Extension 311

Aloha - Movin' On

2006-09-01T16:30:00.000-07:00

Yes it's true. After 10 years, I have left CompuMentor. (And I'm only now catching up to updating this blog....)

I will be consulting - in and around a lot of the topics covered in this blog, as well as my new "independent me" blog.

I'm also the part-time Director of Technology at a small K-8 school in San Franicisco. I haven't cleared it with them yet that I'll be talking about my work and lessons learned there - but I will name the skill soon. ;-)

In the meantime, there's always a ton of unfinished business - blog posts I have yet to compose; several dozen unanswered emails from leftover projects I've been working on; and several more dozen unanswered emails from people wishing me well.

Thanks. And I'm not really going anywhere. Just moving over here.

OBDouglasAdams: So long and thanks for all the fish.

Spin Project - Presentation and thoughts

2006-08-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Spin Academy, and boy am I dizzy. (Ba-dum tsss).

I have uploaded the full presentation I gave at Spin on the Consultant Commons website. Yes, it's very similar to the CTN presentation, but the difference in the room was significant. Most of the folks at Spin Academy are inherently interested in expanding their online voice, and a lot of them were younger than myself, so there was a lot more energy and interest in what some of these tools can do - and less apprehension about "the new stuff I have to learn." (And I can't blame it on the fact that my CTN presentation was the dreaded late afternoon slot - my Spin presentation was after dinner! And we went 30 minutes over!).

Some quick thoughts:

I need to get a lot more familiar with podcasting. Honestly, I tend to know what I know because I've messed around with the tools - even if I haven't used them. But I've listened to a total of one podcast so far - and I'll be honest - it showed when I tried to answer questions.
One attendee came up to me afterwards and said that their organization uses a blog to post news-related commentary - and gets listed on GoogleNews! That's a great way to work the system.
We talked briefly at the end of the presentation about social network tools. I expressed my specific feelings about social networking "destinations" (that I've expressed on this forum before) - although not very much coverage was given to the potential successful uses of places like MySpace. I could point to some, but maybe a better riposte to my argument are some of the thoughts about the use of MySpace, from NetSquared (the link takes you to the search results page for "MySpace").

I'm blogging from CTN

2006-08-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

Holy cramoly - wasn't that cool!

Blogged with Flock

Update: Yeah, so I gave a pesentation yesterday at the CTN conference - and at the end of it, I blogged directly to Ext311 from Flock. HEnce the random photo from upstate New York, and the text.

My full ppt presentation is here, and all the links to the apps referred in the presentation are here.

And I'm doing something again - similar, yet different - at the Spin Academy next week, up in Sonoma.

RSS to Email?

2006-07-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

I'm testing an RSS to email feature, and since my previous tests have failed, I've decided to go live on this blog in an effort to force the service I'm trying out - Squeet - to send me an email update of my blog.

No, I'm not doing this because I would prefer to get blog updates via email. But I might want to get wiki updates via email, and as far as I can tell, WikiSpaces doesn't support email updates, only RSS/ Atom feeds.

See, I've helped someone set up a WikiSpace because - well, it's easy to use, particulary for non-techies. And then to ask people to set up a feed-reader? Not in my world, dood. KISS - email and the Web - baby steps, baby steps. I'm not throwing Wiki-style CamelCase and RSS to a tech newbie in the same week....

(And if this fails, I may have to add another filler blog post.... Pray that it works...)

Fixed Flock?

2006-07-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

So a while back, I tried a couple of different things to see if I could incorporate my blogging more easily, as opposed to having to log in every time I wanted to blog something (no, I prefer not to sit on logged-in sites, but I'm slowly changing).

I tried the plug-in Performancing, but had some challenges with it. A friend convinced me to re-try Flock, which is what I'm using create this post. We'll see if it works.

(And a mean RSI pain just flared up, so I guess I'm quitting for the day. Perhaps too much Drum-Fu this weekend at the SF Theatre Fest?....)

Blogged with Flock

Bonding, not branding

2006-07-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

Following up on a little on a previosu presentation I gave on "how to blog, and why to blog, and then - why to read other people's blogs (and how)" (otherwise known as my blog-tags-rss presentation). Here's a succint case made by Nancy Schwartz on why you should read and search blogs - make sure to click to read the full article. It may make my post about how to set up feeds on Bloglines using Technorati make a little more sense.....

IssueLab - nonprofit research portal

2006-07-20T12:25:00.000-07:00

IssueLab, created by the Chicago-based New Media for Nonprofits, collects and shares (or links to) the plethora of nonprofit research out on the Web. As far as I can tell, it's all free, unlike research clipping services. Part of the strategy is that nonprofits register (for no fee) to add their own reports - or add links to their research. There's a wide range of information on the site, from The Almanac of Hunger and Poverty in America 2006 to Health Care and Opportunity - but since it relies on organizations uploading info, there are a few holes (the tech reports section is fairly light, and there's nothing under "Arts and Culture").

Nonprofit Operations Tips blog!

2006-07-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

It's exciting to see things come full circle. I first met Heather when I was giving a presentation on Healthy and Secure Computing, and she was struggling to manage the technology where she worked. Since then, she's plowed through a ton of resources on nonprofit technology, continued to develop her expertise in nonprofit management operations - and now she works for Aspriation Tech, and is posting blog tips on nonprofit operations - that I end up reading!

Carnival of Nonprofit Blogs: Technology!

2006-07-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

Last week over here I mentioned the call that went out to bloggers for the "best-of" technology for nonprofit blogging. Well, here are the results - edition #5 of the Carnival of Nonprofit Blogs: Technology.

("The Carnival of what?....")

New Technology in the Arts site and blog!

2006-07-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

A while back, I too was invited to be on the Honorary Committee of the new Technology in the Arts conference (my nomination was care of the Beth Kanter, linked).

Now that they have the website up, what's the first thing they do? Set up a blog! Brilliant!

Technorati hates me - I wanna Rent an Expert

2006-07-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

So the idea with Technorati is that you can use it to not only find out what other people are saying, you can find out what other people are saying about you.... And, if you use tags in your posts, you can then share "conversations" on a topic (as defined by the tag) with others. To wit, I can search for "social networking" as a keyword, and I get a different list of blogs than if I use it as a tag search - because some people are specifically identifying their post as being relevant to "social networking." (Note: you'll get different mileage on tag searches if you keep or omit the space between words).

How is this supposed to work? Well, you add some html into your blog post, as directed here - using your tag word of choice. Recently, I've tagged blog posts with OCC2006 (posts I think are relevant for Online Community Camp), WineCamp (posts relevant to WineCamp and WineCampers), and MMC2006 (the Making Media Connections conference). However, if you look at the links, while my OCC2006 and WineCamp posts show up on Technorati (amongst other bloggers who have also blogged about these events), my MMC2006 posts don't.

And that's frustrating, because there are several worthy posts (oh, and one more)!

I would consider going and Renting An Expert (courtesy of the folks who bring you BrainJams) - except that I'm in rehearsal for a small performance. Oh well - maybe next time someone can come and rent me!

The coming mobile revolution

2006-07-05T18:36:00.000-07:00

OK, so in some circles I'm kinda late on this one: At WineCamp a few of us talked about what kinds of technology could actually help people on the ground - in rural parts of the developing world - actually make money. I.e. we were avoiding the altruistic conversation about how technology can help on a broader level of education and access, and jumping straight to the point: can the use of technology lead directly to someone in rural India/Tanzania/Guatemala making money. Becuase if anything is at the base of economic development, it's economics....

Well, this lead to various conjectures on how mobile technology can be used to "do work." What kind of work? Well, take a look at MobileActive. While mostly focusing on how mobile technology is used in the developed world (and parts of the developing world that has a decent infrastrcuture), this website does a great job of documenting how people are using cell-phone technology to do work.

For example, one conjecturial idea from that WineCamp conversation was to follow the Grameen Phone mobile-as-pay-phone model. Another is to use cell phones as a tool for unskilled laboreres to collect time-sensitive field data. Then there's the case study of Ugandan farmers using cell phones ot get accurate prices for their coffee - and finding buyers without having to trek into the city.

A final conjecture of how to use a mobile to "do work" (as opposed to a information tool) is using the innate human ability to distiguish things that computers cannot - based on Amazon's Mechanical Turk program (what the heck is Mechnical Turk?). The popularity of the application is fading, but when you look at the types of work that is being outsourced to the developing world - from IT support to IT application development to legal clerical prep work to actual content revision and generation - you begin to get the idea that someone getting paid to do simple tasks on a cell phone is not that far away.... Both figuratively, and maybe literally.

Filed in: WineCamp and RuralTech

Passing it along: blog tools review

2006-07-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a good review of the top seven blogging tools -courtesy of Idealware, definitely a good site to familiarize yourself with if you work in the nonprofit tech world. (The review is also linked on my del.icio.us list of great web tools panel had in Chicago ).

Ego searches on Technorati - aggregated onto Bloglines

2006-06-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I gave a workshop on blogging, tagging and RSS (full ppt outline here). One of the key elements of the workshop was setting up a system similar to a personalized "news clipping" service, using Bloglines and Technorati. The main gist was this -

Identify tags of interest (like this one on Del.icio.us or this one on Flickr), and copy the link to the orange RSS/ "Feed" URL into a new "My Feed" in Bloglines". The benefit of this is that if you do this for all your tags of interest, this gives you a "feed" of those tags all in one place, as opposed to checking on FLickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, etc every day/week/month.

Now the kicker of the workshop was supposed to be the idea of setting up "ego searches" from Technorati into Bloglines. Technorati is a service that searches blogs; the idea is that you can find out what people are saying about your organization, or issue area that is important to your organization, by typing in the appropriate search terms in Technorati. (For example, see this is a link to a Technorati search on "poverty".)

What I wanted to do was be able to set up appropriate searches (like the one above) then copy the RSS URL link into Bloglines. As an example, if worked for the ONE campaign, and I did a search on Technorati for "poverty" and then "www.one.org" - then pasted the feeds into Bloglines - all of a sudden I've got a pretty nice little ego search news clipping service, all located in one aggregated blog reader (Bloglines).

Except it's not quite that easy - Technorati doesn't allow you to automatically create an RSS feed of a search term (unlike a tag). To see what I mean, compare a Technorati keyword search with a Technorati "tag" search - the former does not have the tell-tale RSS button at the bottom (it's blue on Technorati for some inexplicable reason, so if at first you don't see it on the second link, look again - it's there, at the end of the list, not at the bottom of the page).

Well, I finally figured out how you're supposed to do it:

You need to set up a Technorati account first.
After you've logged in, using the search page (not the tag page), type in your search keyword.
Then make that search a "Watchlist."
Once you've made the watchlist, you will see the telltale RSS button in that search-list. That's what you can copy and paste into Bloglines.

(Note that - as far as I can tell - both Del.icio.us and Flickr do not enable RSS feeds of keyword searches, only tag searches.)

It would be great if people could tell me if this made sense and was useful. I'm trying to strike a balance between giving appropriate information (I know, I know, I don't necessarily explain how do to do things very explicitly) and spenfing all my time writing tech primers on Web2.0 tools.

Filed in: MMC2006

Taking a break - till late next week

2006-06-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

After the last two weeks of running around (nothing, I know, compared to the folks who work hard to put on the events that I was attending during that time) , I'm off on a short personal trip that takes me away from my computer. Well, *I* take myself away from my computer, but that's because I still can, unlike some folks I know.

(And a nod to co-panelist Christine Cupaiuolo who pointed out a bunch of great nonprofit sites, including the previously mentioned Chicago Classical Music, which she actually helped launch. Christine is a contributor to PopPolitics too - why don't you head on over there and read a bit, eh?.)

The resources are here!

2006-06-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Some more things I learned while in Chicago:

Both Steppenwolf Theatre and fans of Chicago Classical Music have multiple-author blogs! Way to go!

So I finally posted all the website links that we mentioned - even in passing - during our web tools conversations at the Community Media Workshop conference in Chicago. Even if you weren't there, this might be an interesting list for you to look at, since it's the more comprehensive list of tools I've put together, and even tried to add some sort of context in their description.

http://del.icio.us/tag/mmc2006

What you are looking at: This is a list of websites that I have "bookmarked" on the website Del.icio.us. I have bookmarked the sites, added a brief description, and then added "tag" categories of my own making. If you read my previous post about Del.icio.us, then you'd know that you can slice-n-dice this list in several ways. For example, everything tagged with mmc2006 (my tag in reference to the Making Media Connections conference) can be found from teh link above.

If you only want to look at the blog-related items on the list, add the tag "blog" using a plus (+) sign directly in the URL:

http://del.icio.us/tag/mmc2006+blog

If you wanted to look at the advocacy tools, add "advocacy":

http://del.icio.us/tag/mmc2006+advocacy

If you wanted to get sneaky, you could drop the "mmc2006" tag, and see anything tagged "advocacy" within all of Del.icio.us - which may mean you'll get things out of context.

See my previous post for more info about how the Del.icio.us tags (and URLs) work, and how looking at my tags is different than looking at all tags.

(And this has also been tagged in Technorati under: MMC2006

Making those connections - a quick review

2006-06-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

[Not finished with the resources list yet....]
In the meantime (see previous post), here are two quick case-studies and an insight (if I can call it that):

GROW has a website built on Drupal, and publishes podcasts. According to the E.D. and primary podcaster, Erika Huber, they are the 2nd most popular educational podcast online. She is one of the few female podcasters online now, and one of the few educational podcasters (in comparison to, say, techie podcasters). And the website traffic - and hence the people who have become engaged with her organization - has ballooned from the low 30s to the thousands per month.

Erika says she uses GarageBand (on the Mac) to record and edit her podcasts, but someone else recommended Audacity (an open-source downloadable app for PCs and Macs). Or you could use Odeo Studio and do it all online. You can find GROW's podcasts, along with tons of other podcasts, at Podcast.net - but maybe the easiest thing to do is to search for "podcast" and your favorite topic area.

Wow - a nonprofit organization that's using a bunch of tools we've been talking about for months - and I had never heard of them before.

(Someone else pointed out the Western Folklife website - including recordings of cowboy poetry and a group of different western artists who have their own blogs! Great things are happening online with new nonprofit media! Thanks Alex!)
And this points to a key lesson - something I know but occasionally need reminding of. Connections and communities happen between people - the tools are just a means to an ends. The huge interest in social networking applications sits on top of the assumption that networking in and of itself is important. Ultimately, it's often necessary to make that human conneciton at regular points along your community-building travels. Honestly, I don't know how long I would have looked and never found a) a great, simple Drupal site, b) that is hosting podcasts - unless I had personally travelled halfway across the country and met Erika in person.

But now, as Marnie experiences - can you network so much you're a mile wide but an inch deep? And it that soley the fault of our new tools, or the fact that our society has not yet adjusted to how to make these tools work for us, and opposed to just working us.

Technorati: MMC2006

Making Media Connections - but no resources yet

2006-06-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the Community Media Workshop conference in Chicago, where I ran a four hour workshop/ presentation on blogging, tagging and RSS (full PDF is linked here). I learned a lot, and I also realized that there are a lot of tools that we take for granted in this web-saturated corner of our world (read: California Bay Area) that can be of huge use to nonprofits. Of course we know that, otherwise we would not have put on the NetSquared conference - but many of the people at the conference had never heard of NetSquared, nor CompuMentor. In fact, it was one of the first times I've presented in front a group of nonprofits (and kudos to CMW to getting together such a great pool of nonprofits) where barely half had heard of TechSoup.org. So we are still challenged with getting the word out there - it's not so much a digital divide, as a knowledge gap.

I was on a "Web tools" panel the second day, the audience make-up of which was similar to my workshop the first day - a mix of web-savvy folks and those just trying to understand and catch-up. A bunch of tools and URLs were thrown around, and I volunteered to capture them for future reference. I haven't done it yet! But I'm working on it - check back on my blog soon!

Technorati: MMC2006

Tech Strategies for the Developing World

2006-06-09T17:45:00.000-07:00

"Tech Strategies for the Developing World" is (my) title for a series of conversations we had at WineCamp - what kinds of technology (if any?) could be directly useful "on the ground" in rural parts of the developing world - as opposed to just looking at technology from a generalized "learning technology is good for job-training" standpoint. I didn't take notes at the time (hey, we had no power!), but I wrote down all I could remember from those conversations, and put the notes on the (new) WineCamp wiki.

I'll likley go back to it and start adding URLs as I find them (like the wifi bus and MobileActive and Grameen). However, the Wiki is not a good place to have a conversation, so I (or you?) need to check out Omidyar, the obvious place to continue this conversation - and see if there's any community there of this sort yet or not. And if not, let's start one!

Technorati'd under: WineCamp RuralTech (unless you have a better tag suggestion?)

Online Community Camp and Proprietary Communities

2006-06-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

Online Community Camp was a hybrid between a one-day conference and an open-space unconference. It struck me that most people in the room were not the Web2.0 Geekerati that dominated WineCamp and NetSquared (I say this based on a simple comparison of WineCamp blogs, tags and photos (or NetSquared blogs, tags, photos) and occ2006 blogs, tags and photos) The audience represented a large range of coporate and for-profit interests, with (slightly more than a) handful of nonprofits thrown in, so maybe occupying the middle ground of hierarchy vs. spontaneous organization was best after all. Another element that was striking was that most people seemed to refer to message boards as the primary definition of "online community" (although you can build an online social network of people with related interested in photo communities, event communities, and even collections of tags).

Although the OCC crowd was honestly interested in sharing best practices and feedback, many were less interested in actual transparent community sharing, and more interested in building their own communities to increase their own value. Now I say this without judgement - a community of support for learning-disability--challenged children doesn't need to be visible across the world - but other communities presented where definitely more arbitrarily closed. My "gestalt" from this meeting was a) the obvious, that online communities (and the buzzword social networking) are hot, and b) there are a lot of people who believe they can either make money directly, or build the value of their organization, by building an online community.

Again, I don't have a problem with this philosophically. There are very good reasons - even for activist nonprofits or for private coporations - to build communities that can support and add value (and improve the sustainability) of the "parent" organization. As for "monetizing your community" - well, I may consider myelf more of a venture socialist than capitalist but if anything I'm a data communist (commonist?).

And this comes back to the fundamental challenge I had with the conferenece - very few people were interested in overlapping communities, or how to share communities and community content. (There was a tiny audience of partially interested people at the identity / data standards lunchtime talk, given by Identity Woman. I'm very interested in her and other's work in the Identity Commons, for reasons described below). Everyone seemed to think they could build an independent community that would somehow be able to compete for a user's attention better than anyone else's - and that goes for nonprofit organizations building communites of support or activism as well as the dating communties, the "brand loyalty" communities and social networking communities.

I don't believe in that. I believe that communities will not be locations, but shared interests and conversations and photos and music (read: data) that can be found and sifted through using the right tools. (and I believe in open wikis so that other people who are valuable to the conversation can join in - and so that information can be found later by search engines, etc).

So as I try to redesign an online community, I'm particulary interested in how people can participate without having to continually come back to the site URL - i.e. how can I build my online community so that it plays with all the right tools. That doesn't mean I'm going to ignore the more basic users who will come to the site, log in, and then post information - but I want to make sure that people can publish remotely from their web browser (i.e. using Flock or Performancing); they can read information remotely, (i.e. use standards such as XML/ RSS and Microformats). And I want to republish from other sites (using a RSS reader or aggregator) as well as publish out to other sites (uisng things like automatic XML genration and using tags...). And ultimately, I want the site to be able to access and share an open identity format - to distribute not only basic login information, but different levels of identity profile information.

Filed under: OCC2006

WOW! - Slick theatre preview!

2006-05-31T11:48:00.000-07:00

In a moment of downtime (downtime? wassat?) after all the conference/camps I've been to, I caught up with some of my personal mail. One was from the Magic Theatre (in San Francisco), that is producing The Long Christmas Ride Home, by Pulitzer-winner Paula Vogel.

Of course, given my theatre background, I'm interested in this - and since a member of my performance group is one of the puppeteers, I'm doubly interested. By their online preview was so slick and ... well, awesome, I stopped everything to blog about it. They also have interviews with the creative team, as well as a radio podcast from Cool as Hell (mentioned here previously).

.... Wow. Not only is it a great preview, but - I stopped everything to blog about it -. I've been bitten by the big blue-black blog bug that bleeds blue (say that for your performance warm-ups).

I went to wineCamp and all you got was this blog post

2006-05-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

So what was WineCamp, and what happened?

Well, you can read about it - just click to find out who is talking about WineCamp, who took photos at WineCamp and who is tagging WineCamp on Technorati and Del.icio.us. And even if you don't know what that means, you can click away and read more.

Me in deep coonversation, courtesy of Miss Rogue.

My far too simple attempt at describing what happened:
A bunch of developers, "start-up"-sy types, nonprofit techies and a few brave "What's a wiki?" folks converged on a wind-swept ridge in Skeleton County, a grassy patch with no running water and no electricity, but a beautiful view and several rustic picnic tables and firepits built by hand by vineyard owner Andrew Ferriere - and spent a day talking about various techie-social-good topics - then the next day swooped (or swoopt as the Canadians might spell it) down to a winery with wireless access to work on some real-life coding as well as continuing the conversations. For example:

Libba from Outpost for Hope, that helps find missing persons, was offered a website makeover (including functionality upgrades to their youth database search tools) by the CivicSpace crew. By the time I left, they had not completed the all the finishing touches on the site makeover, but it was definitely a feet-to-the-fire test for the Drupal superstars to crank out what they did in 5 hours. I'll be pointing to whatever comes out of the code-sprint whenever/ wherever it shows up.

A woman representing The Princess Project - that provides prom dresses to girls who could not otherwise afford them - wants to explore using open-source community and donor management tools for her organization, and brainstormed how to convince her funders to fund the development of these tools.

We had a small-group conversation about how technologies can be leveraged in countries where there is no broadband technology infrastructure to support the use of current Web-based tools - so what is possible as an alternative? Several other conversations sprung out of this, including mobile digital storytelling, extending the use of mobile technology, and how to use simple tools like a cell phone to do work - for money - in remote villages from Guatemala to Tanzania. We agreed to follow-up on these topics - most likely on the Omidyar network (but I'll point you from here when that happens).

On the day-of-coding (Day 2), a group of digital video folks jammed together a quick videocast ad on how technology can benefit nonprofits, using Drupal as the tech and Lines Ballet as the nonprofit. Part of the point was to cross-train several people on the video-production basics, but something tells me that ad will make it online - possibly by NetSquared?

Filed under: WineCamp

Camp Squared 2 NetSquared

2006-05-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

I've got a lot of catching up to do. I just came off Online Community Camp and WineCamp, and am off to NetSquared tomorrow. There's a lot to catch up on, but the brief skivvy (is that redundant?) right now:
OCC: Largely corporate (I think I counted less than 10 nonprofits for 100 attendees), but to be fair, it was never billed as any sort of community building specifically for civic society (and I'm not saying that as a critique, it is just what it is). I personally didn't take back a lot from the conference, but that's partly because I'm not attempting to create a place for a community to gather - I am more interested in how communities can exist using distributed Web2.0 tools - i.e. there may be an actual place (or URL), but maybe it's just a distributed conversation. I did have an interesting conversation on the challenges of online international community building; perhaps I'll repost those notes on ConsultantCommons.org as well as the (closed) OCC Wiki. I'll do a more formal report-back on OCC soon.
WineCamp: Despite last-minute organizing (and direction) challenges, WineCamp turned out to be an incredible event - in no small part to the setting, and the wine(s) (those being Stormhoek, Ferriere and Stevenot) and the enthusiasm of the attendees. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt's original idea of bringing nonprofits and geeks together paid off - both in tangible ways with real-life, in-the-moment projects (including a "barn-raising" website makeover for a nonprofit attendee) - and dozens of passionate and creative conversations, of which one I know will continue past the Calaveras county mark - because I intend to personally drive that conversation.

More on all this to be continued. In the meantime, I've got a day to catch my breath, then off to NetSquared, where a small but sunburnt crowd might regale the others with big smiles and enthusiastic tales.

Technorati tags: winecamp occ2006

Translation - first (personal) feedback.

2006-05-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

[This probably makes more sense now that I actually published the translated version - see this post...]

The previous post was to see a) if posting in French as well could generate traffic that posting in English does not, b) to see how challenging or easy it could possibly be. (Disclosure: I'm essentially fluent in French, but my gramer and speleing sukes... if you get me.)

It's not a hard process per se, but it's time consuming. I pushed my text through Babelfish, corrected the text, and then re-added the links.
Obviously, there isn't a bunch of very relevant text in the post that would only be found in French (I mean, the French name for WineCampFrance is... WineCampFrance.). Hey, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision....
The automated translation tools do a fairly middling job of translating. It's often easy enough to correct by hand, but for example, in my case, I can never remember the damn accents, and I have to rewrite the English with an aim to get Google/ Babelfish to use the word I'm going for, to make sure I've spelled it correctly.
What the above is implying that I don't feel confident posting the first translation swipe on my blog, because as Marnie sez - "blogging scales stupidity". I.e. mistakes here are seen by larger groups than in personal emails (for example) and stay published indefinitely. So I want to make a reasonable effort to make it readable. But that is a barrier to posting in another language that I am reasonably fluent in - and if I have that problem, I'm positive there are tons (no, millions) of competent-but-non-native-English speakers who are not posting in English because of this same fear - which means when I do English-language searches I'm missing them, and they are missing me - even if we could communicate easily once we found each other....
The other time consuming challenge is that I had to re-paste all the "link layer" URL addresses - it wasn't a matter of cutting and pasting in URLS - I had to add the links by hand again. Oh how I long for a blog plug-in that will translate in the blog-post on the fly....
The next step in my experiment is to sign up for NativeText. More to come....

Entre toi et moi et l'EntreNet

2006-05-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

[I'm trying a bit of a test - how mch does language restrict (or expand) your reach online?]

Au cas où vous ne vous rendez pas compte, ca buscule beaucoup en ce moment au sujet de l'EntreNet, les communautés sur le Web, et les ONGs. En bref, voilà ce que ressemble ma semaine:

Jeudi je vais au Online Community Camp, à Fort Mason (San Francisco). Il n'y a plus de place depuis quelques semaines, alors si vous ne pouvez pas assister, engagez-vous en ligne sur Meetup (pour SF, pour d'autres régions regardez ici).
Apres ca, je vais à WineCamp dans encore un autre nouveau department de vin de Californie, Calaveras. L'enregistrement est encore ouvert, mais soyez prévenu - c'est du vrai camping.

(Et si vous êtes dans les sud de la France en juin, peut-être vous pouvez assister à l'UpFing06 et aider une autre Gregoire à organiserWineCampFrance.)

Finalement, après un bref sursis, j'assiste le mardi de NetSquared.

3 events, 7 days, Web 2.0

2006-05-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't kept up, there's a lot going on right now in the concentric circles of Internet tools, community building, and nonprofits. This is what my week looks like:

Thursday I'm off to Online Community Camp, at Fort Mason (San Francisco). It's been sold out for weeks, so if you can't make it, sign up for the Online Community Meetup (for SF, for other regions look here).
Then I'm trekking out to WineCamp in yet another new California wine county, Calaveras. Registration is still open, but be forewarned - this is real camping. Not Online Community Camp or BarCamp.

(And if you're in the south of France in June, maybe you can catch up with the UpFing06 fest and help another Gregoire help organize WineCampFrance.)

Then, after a brief respite, I'll be helping out on Tuesday of NetSquared.

Detritus of the Digital Life

2006-05-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

In the course of testing - as well as using - various online tools, I leave behind me a wake of logins, passwords and open accounts. Some of these I use on a regular basis - Deli.ici.ous, Blogger, Flickr - and some less frequently - BaseCamp, any number of Wikis, New York Times login, etc. And even if I have tried to unify my logins and passwords (high securityvs. low security) it's still confusing - am I using an email or a name; is the password my email password, or my high security or low security password? And given the rash of laptop thefts, I'm not about to have all of my sign-ins saved for me.

This makes me think of the two main directions I'm going in right now - one way with the proliferation of Web.20 tools (which are dispersed everywhere) and the other way with something like Drupal - whose users basically tried to incorporate into the application the functionality of any new tool, via module development (there are Flickr, Eventful, Del.ici.ous and various blogging modules available, just to name a few).

So I see two fundamental directions - distributed vs. consolidated, and to be honest, I'm veering towards the consolidated camp. I can't do the rounds every day and catch-up with comments on Flickr, on Wikis A thru Z, on discussion boards (on more than one site) and then in email too. I know there are patchwork ways of being able to "publish" (comments, blogs, emails, etc) from a single source - configuring the web browser Flock is one example - and that if you wanted to, you could RSS your world, so that all your info sources come to one place (e.g. Bloglines or Feedster). But if I get 50+ emails a day (low by some people's standards, but that's not counting spam) and more than 2 RSS feeds, I'm toast.

As Zacker said, email is the killer app (~~I can't find the original blog post, but~~ read his overview at the beginning of this post - essentially, all you really need is an email list and a whitebaord (read: wiki) - and you can acoomplish a hell of a lot.) I agree - but even then, too many of either these are not helpful.... I know that this explosion of new tools wil leventually contract and consolidate - but until then, it's going to be a little hectic. In the meantime, I'm hoping open-source universal sign-on will alleviate some of these problems.

Can't go to NetSquared? Then go here

2006-05-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

You might have heard already that NetSquared has become a victim of its own success. Registration is closed (erm, well, it never opened).

But you didn't really wanna hear others talk about what they accomplished, did you? No! It's all about you! What can you do with social web tools? And who's around to help?

Well, I'm trying. Here are some other events going on that aren't full - yet - which will put you in the center spot (primarily because they are "un-conference"/ "open-space" types of events) . Because it's all about you - and your constituents, of course.

Online community camp
If you're managing, building or trying to salvage an online community. Proposed topics include:

Community management issues;
Review of community tools;
Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
Effective use of volunteers;
Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

WineCamp
A BarCamp-style event, putting social-web tools developers together with nonprofits in a weekend-long brainstorm. A) Yes, it is camping, but hotels are available (see link at bottom of WineCamp page). B) No, they can't help with your network. Or your printer. C) I''ll be there. Look for this mug.
Some proposed topic areas:

Engaging your stakeholders - what tools are available to expand the opportunities for your clients, audiences, supporters, and funders to support your work?
Broadening the conversations - how can your clients and supporters become your best marketers and advocates?
Collaborating across teams / distances - what are the best practices and tools for working in a distributed team?
Harnessing "social web" tools for your Website and your desktop - what are the tools out there, and how do you determine what will work best for your organization?

NetSquared-orbit events

DrupalCamp will be having a Santa Clara meeting (Drupal for Social Change) the night before NetSquared.
There's also talk of a WineCamp Round-Up (TeqUp?) happening Wednesday, May 31st
And this coming Tuesday (May 6, 6pm) - NetTuesday moves to Canvas Gallery (Inner Susnet, San Francisco) for an informal smorgasbord of Netty-Squarey-Thingies and WineyCampy Thingies.

There - I like that better

2006-04-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

I just played a bit with the blog page design, just to see what it would do...

Hmm, I don't have much to say, but I want to add more aggregated info to my sidebar.

Ain't that the way it's going, huh?

Community website governance structure?

2006-04-25T15:35:00.000-07:00

What is a good basic governance structure for a community website? I'm asking because these kinds of "online communities" are cropping up all over the place, and I'm seeing a pattern I've seen before - when nonprofits encounter volunteers or donated computer hardware.

The basic (unexamined) assumption is a) free is better, and b) if we get it (community site, volunteer, hardware), it'll run itself. Left unexamined is the management time involved in making sure these resources run smoothly, and that some roles should b kept in-house, and some should be delegated.

Below is a brief brain-dump of the roles involved in running a online community site. Often, many roles are the responsibility of one person,but it's important to recognize the different roles which could eventually be divvied up among individuals. I know there's probably a good 5-6 formal models out there for tech support that I should follow - but I've got 20 minutes now, might as well just jot this down.

For the first read through, just ignore the little symbols.

Tech support layer:
*One time / setup high-tech needs (installation, configuration, theming, design, new functionality)
*Ongoing back-end support (problems with code - SQL, PHP, Java)
Ongoing general support (upgrades, patches, functionality support, domain registration)
@Ongoing back-end maintenance (adding email addresses, running backups, checking logs, escalating if necessary)

Management / Ownership layer:
@Fiscal responsibility (person who pays the bills: domain; website hosting; etc)
@Major decision makers (i..e the people who would decide on the site name, who approve payments, delegate all other roles)

Community layer:
@Ongoing maintenance (fixing broken links, watching for spam posts, welcoming new users)
*Super users -
-Forum / discussion board owners (people who lead and manage topics)
-Content owners (people who are allowed to manage certain types or areas of content)
-Moderators (people who approve posts, topics, discussions, etc)
*Regular users

Now I went through and identified certain roles:

@ means this role should exist within the organization (i.e. not be a volunteer or outside consultant). Why? Because these are - IMHO - roles that require liability - i.e. a way of requiring action (as opposed to the "best effort" of a volunteer). And even if volunteers are used, these roles should be considered the high-priority ones, so the most reliable - and proactive - volunteers should be selected.

* means this can - and probably should - be outsourced. Either the expertise required is niche enough not to be an asset to the day-to-day activities of the organization, or these roles are the best to delegate to folks who can do them on a "best effort" basis.

If there's no mark, I don't have a strong opinion either way.

[Retroactively filed under: OCC2006]

Finding nonprofit Drupal / CivicSpace developers

2006-04-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

In conversations with Drupal developers, I usually ask if they focus on working with nonprofits or not. If they don't their typical reply is that they work with anyone, including small businesses and nonprofits. I'm not going to argue the pros and cons of separating out nonprofits from other types of clients (if only to make them feel special?....), but I'll use the developers own words to differentiate them.

So I've stuck a very basic overview of Drupal and CivicSpace developers who focus on nonprofits / NGOs on the Net2Learn site (which is still working out the kinks, but go ahead and look at it) - along with resources for finding any type of Drupal/ CS developer.

Please feel free to comment there or here on add'l resources, or pros/ cons of segmenting nonprofits / NGOs from other types of clients. (I know where I stand, but I'm not going to make my case for it right here and now).

Convergence: Drupal Camp

2006-04-11T14:27:00.000-07:00

One of my roles at CompuMentor is to make connections between and among the different worlds we are inhabiting: nonprofit sector and subsectors (like arts); online communities; social web ("Web2.0") tools and developers; community wireless projects; etc. This convergence is one reason why I'm having to broaden the focus of this blog, because just so much is going on that is overlapping with other things right now.

For example, CivicSpace, the organization that is behind the open-source CMS (Drupal) I've championed previously is now - guess what? - fiscally sponsored by CompuMentor (full disclosure: the team I'm part of here strongly supported this decision.) CivicSpace, along with Civic Actions, put together a training weekend for Drupal developers; CompuMentor put up the space, and myself and colleague sat in on the sessions.

You can read a more detailed overview here. In addition to the great overview at the Drupal site, here are a couple of things I noted:

At least 1/3 of the developers present worked at nonprofit organziations themselves. That's fantastic - a strong showing in the vanguard of Drupal developers.
There is a specific challenge to Drupal beyond installing and configuring the system. I've mentioned it previously, and this session bore me out: Drupal is (fairly) easy to install and use, but making it "your own" is not something that can be done by a novice. This weekend session was designed specifically around "theming" - designing the look and feel of Drupal websites.
Jeff Robbins, the trainer and head 'bot at Lullabot, made an important point that touches on my last comment: Drupal is a very strong open-source community, and a lot of development - even stuff that's paid for - is given back to the Drupal community at large. The one area where this does not happen as much is with site "theming." A lot of work goes into theming, and as Jeff pointed out, a "themed" website is your organization's brand. Just as your organization (likely) does not want a generic looking page with some personalized colors, your organization also doesn't want to share the website "brand" you spent several grand developing. Even in this open-source world, there are small pockets of proprietorship....

[If you wanted to push it, you could share a similar but-not-quite theme, with different colors, fonts?.... But who would go through the trouble?]

Yanking links

2006-04-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

I'm yanking the links off the bottom of my posts because they are not what I wanted - I want something to automatically add the tag I attach to a blog post - to my Del.icio.us list. I think Flock does that, but I haven't gotten to that yet...

Flocker blogging fixed?

2006-04-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

If you understand this subject line, you're waaaay ahead of me. (Fogging blocker flix? Focking blix flogger?) Given a nudge by the Flock team I wanted to make sure I had done my due diligence before resorting to the Flockspertise. (I'll stop soon, I promise.)

Turns out that though the auto-setup function doesn't work "automatically" - if you cancel it you can enter your own info. I knew that previously, but what to enter there wasn't clear until I dug up this post - and I'll repost the information here for convenience:

To set up Flock with your Blogger account
1. Tools--> Options --> Blogging tab --> click plus ("+") sign
2. Try typing in the url for your blog (if it finds it, stop here)
3. If it doesn't find it, click CANCEL
4. Manual entries

XML-RPC API: choose Blogger
Blog ID: find this by going to blogger.com, logging
in, and going to your blog's page (past the dashboard) - you will see
the ID at the end of the url
Access Point: http://plant.blogger.com/api/RPC2

I'm now trying it, and if this is the end of the post, that means I was successful.

Update: I was able to successfully set up the blog account on Flock, but not post. These are the errors I got:
* A pop-up window: "blogger getPost() not implemented"
* Then the standard page not found - "Flock could not find the server ext311.blogspot.com"

Update2: I discovered the post I tried to make from Flock was actually posted despite the error messages - without my subject line (using instead my first line of text). And the formatting was very spaced out. But it... worked? Flock is still a work in progress, so if we make a step forward every day, we're still getting somewhere. :-)

New colors, new topics

2006-04-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

One reason this blog has been quiet recently is because of lot of my work has not be focused on arts-and-tech-related topics. So I don't post anything - which is exactly not how this is supposed to work. So I'm expanding my arena of discussion here:

Tech for arts orgs
Online community building (to empower civic engagment, not necessarily building community for community's sake)
Social web tools (otherwise known as Web2.0 tools).

As for those social web tools - they don't work! I am trying to use Performancing, which opens a text-editing window in your browser, then post directly to one or more of your blogs - without having to log in to any of them. (You have to set them up at the beginning, of course).

But so far, I'm getting errors. In fact, my previous version of this post raved about Performancing - before I lost the entire post because I was trying to reconfigure my Blogger settings - because... did I say this before - It doesn't work!

Hmmm, so much for easy-to-use social web tools.

And I know Flock is supposed to be able to do the same thing - but I haven't gotten that working either. Maybe that's the other reason I haven't been posting much lately - I'm still trying to get the bugs out of the tools that were supposed to make this easier.

Handy page translation code

2006-03-10T14:54:00.000-08:00

For anyone reaching out in the international realm (or maybe just wants to reach the millions of Spanish and other-language speakers in the U.S.), you may want to check out the Google translation hack that can put a line of code on your website to translate it into another language.

I've posted the general info here, with a link therein to the original post where I found the code. (That last link is fairly busy, but the content you're looking for is right in the center.....)

[Quick update: The original post uses PHP code to grab the current URL of the page you're looking at, and then inserts it into the translate link code. I have to hard code the URL because the PHP didn't work in the blog template - and I really don't knwo what I'm doing, so I couldn't hack it. What that means is the translate link you see on the right of my blog only translates the home page URL: ext311.blogpsot.com. So if you're looking at some archived material, and you click on a translate link, you'll see the homepage in another language, not the archived article you're looking at.]

Drupal for Nonprofits - Resources

2006-03-10T14:23:00.000-08:00

I posted a bunch of samples and resources in the Net2Learn, within the "Drupal for Nonprofits" resource center.

And for what it's worth, my call for a volunteer has gone completely unheeded. What, do I need ot turn to France or Brazil to find someone?

Offsite video sharing

2006-02-22T17:38:00.000-08:00

Now here's something that will simplify the posting of video online - particularly useful for performing arts demos....

There seem to be two major free video hosting services - YouTube and Google Video.

YouTube seems to operate the same was as Flickr - create an account, share videos, add tags and comments. etc. The limit is 100MB videos at a time, but no monthly bandwidth limit (unlike Flickr...). You can also embed the videos (like I'm embedding the Flickr photos on the sidebar). (Thanks to Zacker of Civic Space Labs fame for the YouTube pointer.)

Then there's Google Video. You need a Google Account (which is different than a Gmail account); they have some operating system specifics and video specs, but no upload limit. It's not designed with the same "tag and share" philosophy as YouTube, but it does allow the downloading of video - which you may or may not want (YouTube allows you to bookmark videos, but not download them - again, similar to Flickr).

One last note: YouTube is much more susceptible to being brought down for he hsoting of copyright content (c.f. history of Napster) than Google. Personally, I would post my demos on both sites.

Now this is using technology in the arts!

2006-02-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

Heddatron. Sweeeet....

Open call for a Drupal/ Civic Space Labs volunteer

2006-02-01T16:35:00.000-08:00

You saw this coming: I'm looking for a volunteer to help with a (very little) CompuMentor case-study. Pulling together my focus on performing arts, CompuMentor's desire to expand our knowledge and experience in Web2.0 technologies, and never turning a blind eye to possibilities of participation in international nonprofit technology spheres, I have been helping Theatre Without Borders conceptualize what it would take to move from their mostly-hand-coded HTML site to one that is much more participatory, distributed and automated. And based on an open-source CMS tool like Civic Space Labs.

There's been a lot of work up to now, discussing their needs and priorities. And we're now at the stage to turn what I think is a great possibility into reality... Or not. Because this project has no budget. Nada. CompuMentor is essentially volunteering my time, and TWB has no money. In fact, they actually barely exist as an organization, which suits them fine, because they don't want to be tied to any particular country or entity.

So I'm looking for a volunteer to help us out assessing and implementing a website upgrade for Theatre Without Borders. What we need is someone with the following (see below):

Experience and even expertise in Drupal and / or Civic Space Labs - OR another open-source CMS package (we can talk options...).
A clear understanding that there is no money for this project, which means all of your time will be unpaid. With that comes, of course, a clear idea of how much time you'd be willing to volunteer over the course of the next few months. And of course, that doesn't mean you won't get experience, karma points, and depending on your location, a drink offered in gratitude.
Experience negotiating scopes of work, which is how we're going to determine what you can do given your volunteer availability and the actual project scope. Essentially, we want to know you're not going to bite off more than you can chew.
Experience with arts organizations, nonprofit organizations, or international NGOs. This is because if you say "PHP" someone might say "Bless you" or ask "Your what hurts?" They don't deal in tech, they deal in theatre and artists and peacebuilding and not MySQL databases. If you've worked in this environment before, great - if not, you're setting yourself up to be frustrated. Just saying is all...

Your location is somewhat irrelevant in this new age.....

If you're that person - or you know that person - contact me. This isn't formal, so I don't need a cover letter or resumé (yet) - (read: no attachments or ya go straight to the spam bucket). Note that if you just say "Oooh, pick me!" I clearly won't know why you're the right candidate. ;-)

This call will probably be "live" for a couple of weeks, and I'll be pointing to it frequently. I may even edit this list during the course, if certain requirements or issues become obvious after talking to volunteers.

Catching up with my blog-reading

2006-02-01T15:50:00.000-08:00

Information overload. That's all I can say. Some great things going on over there. I mean, there. Like the International NGO Flickr group. Or the round-up of artistic process blogs (which points back here, natch...).

So I'll leave you with the same dazed look while I try to compose an appropriate call for volunteers for a Website upgrade based on an open-source CMS tool like Civic Space Labs (which is apparently one of the main technologies that has the most potential to help nonprofits and NGOs create social change.)

Open-source CMS challenges

2006-01-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

I talked previously about a running your website using a content management system. While these kinds of tools aren't new, what is new is the accessibility and power of open-source, free-to-download CMS systems like Drupal and CivicSpaceLabs, and the large online support and development communities built up around them (for the most part, I'm going to focus on Drupal and CSL, two front-runner packages that we are working with at CM). But if these kinds of systems are so powerful - and "free" - then why isn't eveyone already running this software?

Lack of awareness: As is usual, one sphere of the Internet - including a sizeable portion of nonprofit techie folks - already know all about Web2.0 technologies and open source technologies. But I get out quite a fair bit, and there is an even more sizeable portion of the world that thinks I've forgotten the rest of the word "Quad" when I say Drupal. And to be fair, there's also a lot of activie criticism and questioning of these tools; and other open source tools like Joomla, PostNuke, PHPFusion, etc are also competing for the spotlight.

Planning inertia: Regardless of whether you're building a website with HTML tools like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, or you are using a CMS (open source or commerical), you still need to figure out how your site structure, audience, goals, etc. These questions are not answered by these new tools - and it will always be difficult to convince people to invest in planning as opposed to just a magical technological solution.

Technology know-how: Make no mistake - while maintaining, updating and running a website on a day-to-day basis is much easier with Drupal (for example), installing and configuring it still requires a fair amount of niche technology know how. The online support communities favor the "learn it yourself" approach, which is fair for the tech aspects of day-to-day website operations - but what nonprofit line staff really needs to learn about setting permissions on an Apache server or configuring MySQL databases?

Design know-how: These tools are very powerful and flexible - so much so, in fact, that unless you stay with the confines of the established design templates (and look very similar to many other sites), you'll want to find/ hire a designer to help you create something unique.

The first issue CM is trying to address in venues like this blog and the NetSquared event. The second issue has been CompuMentor's bugaboo for the last 20 years, and we'll just keep trying change things little by little.

The last two issues speak to my current work challenge: Where can you find hands-on help for these tools? Sure, you can get "remote" help from the online forums; you can even find and hire a consultant (if you have the money). But I imagine that for every in-demand consultant, there has to be a couple of people who are willing to volunteer to build their chops or their portfolios. But is there an (online?) venue for this kind of discussion? I admit, I might have just as big a blind-spot as those "Quad-drupal" folks I talk to....

I mean, that's what CompuMentor was originally founded on - techies who want to volunteer their skills for social benefit (and to also build their own skills). I don't begrudge a dime from the people who can get paid good money for their skills, but at CompuMentor we are still working with a lot of organizations who don't have enough good money to go around. Volunteer community anyone?

Things to do while I'm gone

2005-12-16T14:38:00.000-08:00

Things for you to do while I'm gone (till Jan 9th):

Keep up with Net2.
Keep up with the SF Municipal Wireless movement.
Read a perspective on money and theatre.
Check out these links to some theatre podcasts.

Theatre of Yugen composer's blog

2005-12-16T14:30:00.000-08:00

Well, it's about time. San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen was the organization to whom I originally made my modest proposal; now the composers for their ambitious, five hour (plus or minus) Cycle Plays project have started a composer's blog.

Rock on (as I'm sure they have said.....)

SF Wireless Community Meeting - Thursday Dec 14

2005-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

Why am I posting this here? Despite a narrow regional focus, this issue will be coming to an urban center near you. Secondly, just as Municipal Wifi development folks need to hear about community needs as much as business needs, that community needs to be represented by arts organizations as much as anyone else.

San Francisco's generic TechConnect page (scroll down to see more details).

TechConnect Community Update
All Community Members Are Welcome!
When: Thursday, December 15, 2005, 6:00pm-8:00pm
Where: 4th Floor Conference Room, SFPUC, 1155 Market Street

Web 2.0: Already under your nose

2005-12-12T13:17:00.000-08:00

Still trying to figure out what the heck I'm talking about when I refer to Web 2.0? As someone so eleoquently put it in last month's TechSoup Web2.0 event:

Web 1.0 = oooh, look...it's a picture of my dog that I put on the Internet with a caption underneath and I learned enough HTML to do this.

Web 2.0 = oooh, look...I can put a picture of my dog on the Internet using a web application so I don't need to know the code to do so, I can tag it so people interested in dogs can find it and leave their input about it, I can link my picture with a web forum that has information about dogs that other people may want to read about.

And I've slowly been adding Web 2.0 tools to this blog for months now. (Of course, if you're reading this via an RSS feed, a) you don't see the things I'm talking about, b) "RSS feed"? - you're already ahead of the game).

Blogging: Well, if you're reading this, then you're already seeing the benefit of the most ubiquitous Web 2.0 tool - blogs. Going back to the description above (and my previous description), I don't have to learn any HTML to be able to post information on this blog. Certainly, this blog is more of a meandering series of comments and observations - but that's just one way to use a blog.

Aggregating and tagging URLs: Del.icio.us is a website / tool that allows me (after I've registered) to "bookmark" URLs, and add a description and tag ("category") of my choosing to any of these URLs. I've been collecting URLs of things important to me (personal and work wise); and I can share them with you, as I have done in my series of links to the right of the blog (above the photos). I just added a "blog" tag for arts orgs that are using blogs to discuss their process. Remember, this is "live" - so any time I add something new in Del.icio.us, it shows up at the top of the list when you click the Del.icio.us link.

Tagging and sharing photos: Flicikr is an online site / tool that allows you to upload photos, create sets, tag ("categorize") photos and share them with - well, anybody. While I don't have a Flickr account myself, I can stll use this tool to display the most recent three pictures that a) have been uploaded to the Flickr site, b) and are tagged with "theatre". That's what those pictures are to the right of the bog.

There are others out there, from Upcoming.org to Wikis, but I just wanted to point out that the world of Web 2.0 is really not that far away. And that's the point. For some more examples of what nonprofits are doing with Web2.0, check out the NetSquared portal.

Open Source Content Management Systems - or "Your New Website"

2005-12-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

In a nutshell: there are tools out there, developed by an open-source community dispersed around the world, that are designed specifically to do the things many community-building nonprofits are trying to do through their websites. (There are actually a ton of tools out there, but I'll get to that soon....)

What I'm referring particulalry is "website-in-a-box" solutions (commonly called "Content Management Systems" or CMS) that are:
* relatively easy to install and configure (given all the functionality)
* "easy" to use (i.e. closer to Amazon.com than the back end of a classic CMS...)
* designed with community use and community-building in mind
* come with built-in functionality like calendars; updated events / news pages; email list management, blogs (which can be used for the "notes from the field") and other tools
* are "free" - i.e. do not cost anything to purchase because they are open source packages

(More on "What is a CMS?" )

I want to clarify that CMS software has been available - commerically - for years; what I'm talking about is the development of open-source CMS software that has now become stable, powerful, and beginning to become user-friendly. And it's free. (Although don't expect to be able to put up a website for free, just because the software is free....) In any case, whether these tools are commercial or open-source, they are designed so that the web administrator's time is spent managing the information, not programming the website.

Some great examples of CMS-based websites are here:
http://www.musicforamerica.org/
http://www.theOnion.com

In fact, both of these sites run on open-source CMS's (Civic Space Labs for the first, Drupal for the latter). All the functionality - the consistent templates for new pages, the polls, the blogs, the gallery - are a built-in functions of the CMS. The organizations themselves provide the specifics of the design (the colors, the layout shapes, etc.) and the content (the text, actual images, etc).

The distiction is key: none of these tools are designed to _do_ the work; they faciliate the work of community building. Again, time can be focused on content and relationships, and not on programming and troubleshooting.

I want to spend some more time here talking about these tools, people who used them (including my own experience running a Drupal site) and what projects we've got coming up that might be of interest to folks. In the meantime, here's an aggregated list of arts sites that are using the open-source CMS called Drupal.

http://www.drupalart.org/

Media Alliance wants your opinion on Wifi in San Francisco

2005-12-07T18:19:00.000-08:00

I diatribed (not ranted) a couple of weeks ago about SF Wifi, and should you care? Unfortunately, it was too late for people to get their voices heard directly by city hall. But then again, there are always other ways of getting heard....

Enter Media Alliance, who are taking on the crusade. I quote mostly directly from their email (coz it's easier....):

Friends of San Francisco wireless,

Media Alliance and its partners have been advocating for ongoing, meaningful opportunities for our communities to provide input into the City's wireless initiative. Thanks to our collective advocacy, we now have an opportunity to speak up.

There will be a hearing at the Government Audit & Oversight Committee of the SF Board of Supervisors on Monday, December 12 at 1 pm. We need as many people as possible to come and speak in favor of an open process and in favor of using the wireless project to bridge the digital divide!

Here are three things you can do:

#1 Come to the hearing on December 12 (more info).

#2 Give your organizational endorsement to our Internet 4 Everyone campaign

#3 Subscribe to our very-low-traffic SF Wireless email list

Builder's Association: a process blog

2005-11-22T17:26:00.000-08:00

File this under "Blog as open process/ community building": The Builder's Association, responsible for such great multi-media theatrical feats as Master Builder and Alladeen, have just developed a new work called SuperVision - and blogged about it.

Thanks to Eric, who pointed it out in a comment to a previous post.

Municipal wireless - why should you care?

2005-11-22T16:58:00.000-08:00

What would you do with "affordable" wifi in your office? Or your home? Do you think your city should support the deployment of city-wide wireless access for all residents (and not just those in swanky neighborhoods?)?

CompuMentor thought about it (scroll down to "What's New"- PDF version of our response is here), and what we've come up with is, I think interesting. Because it's less about whether or not the city should invest in Wifi or not (it looks like wireless will become available in a lot of metropolitan areas whether it's provided by the city or by private enterprise) - but what is a city to do that's really going to help developing neighborhoods? Just provide wireless access? What about access to hardware? Wifi ain't nothing if you've got no laptop or desktop to connect it to (or wireless card....). What about tech support for communities at risk, so they can get a computer fixed at a subsidized rate? Sound like a good idea? Perhaps more effective than just providing low-cost or free wireless?

These are many of the questions being discussed right here in San Francisco, and around the nation as cities consider supporting municipal wireless. You can read the collected feedback on San Francisco's proposal here.

So why does it matter to you? You may or may not have a direct community development mission. Paying a monthly fee for DSL - whether it's $80 a month or $40 (or less?) may not make or break your organization.

All I can say is that I brought my laptop to my rehearsals a couple of times, and were it not for a random wireless access point (not provided by the theatre) I would not have been able to deliver a sample of the program to the folks who needed to reproduce it on time.... (And imagine if you could take photos of a set, put it up on Flickr, and get feedback from people without leaving the theatre....) Sure, these may be less "critical community needs" aspects of municipal wireless access, but Starbucks is not offering T-Mobile for under-served populations either. The idea is that municipal wireless can serve a broad range of needs. The question is - would you and your organization just want wireless access, or more? If more, what?

Confession: I'm leading a doubl-ogging life.

2005-11-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

If you read the small print in the About Me, you'll note I'm also a performing artist, and as such I'm experimenting quite liberally with a lot of the things I talk about here... somewhere else.

I'll get into some more of the details laters, but my main confession is that after pitching the idea to some orgs, and actually seeing other performing arts orgs doing it, I started my own "performance/ rehearsal" blog.

Interestingly, most conventional wisdom seems to indicate that having a blog would encourage people to come see the show. While that may be true, it's unclear how much of an effect the blog has had on attendance (I haven't been asking nor handing out surveys...). What I do know is that people who have seen the show are reading the blog afterwards. Hmmm - I'll take it anyway. ;-)

The more lessons I glean from this process, the more I'll share....

Quickie: Current TV

2005-11-15T13:40:00.000-08:00

Tying in digital storytelling with the Techno-DIY theme of yore, here's a great "so you wanna make video?" guide from Current TV. The home page confused the hell out of me at first, so you might wanna take a look at the about page and the FAQ. And also check out the process for getting your work onto the site (which is where the guide comes in).

Digital Storytelling in New Orleans

2005-11-11T15:30:00.000-08:00

The I-10 Witness Project is, in their words, "community based story collective formed to document the myriad tales emerging from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina."

It's a collaboration of a couple of NOLA arts groups (including the Mondo-Bizarro folks, who I ran in to at this year's NET Fest) and a couple of multi-media orgs, including the Bay Area's own Center for Digital Storytelling.

Supported by Alternate ROOTS, whose mission is "the creation and presentation of original art which is rooted in a particular community of place, tradition or spirit." Sounds about right on.

Best practices: Dance Weblog, and their How-To

2005-11-10T17:03:00.000-08:00

Big kudos to Joe at Butts in Seats for seeing this one.

I know, because of my personal background, I've been very focused on the "theatre" side of performing arts, and have neglected dance (and others as well?). Joe points to a great dance blog, as well as their detailed, 24-page white paper (in PDF) on how to produce a weblog, and how to think about your goals for the blog as well.

My only complaint is that although it's free for download, it's not under a Creative Commons license. :-(

Assorted: Honolulu and Berkeley Arts; Accidental Techie, and free conference calling

2005-11-10T16:34:00.000-08:00

Since my last post was 100% link-free, I thought I'd do a little catch up.

One thing about my blog is sometimes I can't remember if I've actually posted something before. So excuse me if I've already pointed to the slick Honolulu Arts blog - somewaht close to my heart, since UH is my undergrad alma mater. There's also the Berkeley Arts Fest - which during the off season appears to be a (manually) aggregated listing of Berkeley, California arts shows - maybe they could use some help automating their postings? (Both of these can also be found if you click the Del.icio.us-aggregated links off to the right there.)

Also, on a purely tech level, CompassPoint has published a series of resources online aimed at the "accidental techie"..... Which is usually the level of techspertise available on-staff at most small performing arts orgs.

Finally, following up the discussion a while back on the Butts in Seats blog about tools that can be used to work remotely with a creative team, I came across this review of a free conference-call company called FreeConference.com. Now you can argue about the right shade of chartreuse for that backdrop without having to fly the designer in! (I'm joking, I have utmost respect for designers....) Also available in the UK and Germany!

That absentee voting thing

2005-11-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

One comment about absentee voting that I think is appropriate in the context of a blog touching on the performing arts. Last year, there was a considerable push by local performing arts organizations to encourage performing artists to sign up for absentee ballot voting. Why? Because a) if you're unlucky, you're probably working a morning job then going ot rehearsals at night - and these both may be quite far away from your home, b0 if you're lukcy, you actually may be in residence for several weeks in some other local then your voting address.

Obviously, absentee voting can be- and is - for anyone who wants to sign up, but I thought I'd pass on some performing-arts specific reasons for it....

Nov 8th: Vote, then be social!

2005-11-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

(For Californians, and particularly the Bay Area)

Yep, it's that simple. Vote. Or better, yet, vote before the election.

Then come be social. This is the first "meet-up" event for the Net-Squared conference.

All in the vein of my ongoing discussion about the next generation of tools that makes online participation easier.

Blogging is hard

2005-11-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

Well, that's not true. Blogging gets easier every time you do it until it's almost like sending out an email. But the challenge is upkeep. In my slow weeks, I read 5-15 blogs across a variety of topics; and I keep up my own posts too. This is a symbiotic relationship, because a technology-centric blog (as opposed to a personal journal) requires regular online reading. Well, in my swamped weeks, my Bloglines account (which basically "stores" unread blog posts from the blogs I'm interested in) quickly overwhelms me if I don't read it everyday And then I have nothing to say because I'm trying to catch up popn my reading.

Which is why I've pointed you to some of my favorite online weblogs - so you can read them while I try to catch up.

In the meantime, I hope you had a Happy Halloween, a meaningful Day of the Dead, and Happy Eid!

More help with Web2.0

2005-10-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

Web2.0, although somewhat of a buzzword, is not going away despite some criticism that it's just a phase. (I remember when I joined CompuMentor almost 10 years ago, part of my attitude was that this new "World Wide Web thing" was a lot of hype, and wouldn't necessarily help nonprofits and the disenfranchised in any immediate sense. I was right - as well as wrong....)

For me, "Web2.0" is a buzzword, but a useful one in that it applies to a bunch of tools that allow people to do stuff online a) without needing to become programmers (I can avoid learning even something as "simple" as HTML), b) I can do stuff online, as opposed to just read or get stuff online.

If you want to learn more, this blogwill be touching on more of these Web2.0 thingies, but right now there is an online event going on at TechSoup - so go over there and check it out. (A description of the event is here).

Silicon Valley Community Foundation arts initiative

2005-10-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Someone forwarded me this announcement from the SVCF, announcing a major arts initiative. (Jump on it because one of the three workshops has already passed).

At first, I thought it was part of the big Bay Area funds-for-artists initiative from last year, inspired by a study where they discovered artists where - gasp! - underpaid.

(Well, to be fair, the point of the study was not to discover artists' quality-of-lifestyle, but 'the various factors that enable artists to pursue their careers" - or perhaps prevent them from pursuing their careers.....).

So thanks again to the many foundations that believe in the arts, when the state (in both senses of the word) decides not to.

Web2.0 - Whooza-Whatsit?

2005-10-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

You'll notice a series of photos on my website now.

... I'll get to that.

Some of the tools I've been talking about in this space are starting to be commonly referred to as "Web2.0". I think the gist of what a Web2.0 tool is, is something that enables you to share data and information without needing to "program" (i.e be a programmer).

For example, I can post new entries in this blog without needing to know html, Java, XML, RSS, etc. But the more I know about these things, the more I can do.

It's also about open standards. I could design my blog in a particular way so it could also be automatically be republished - entry for entry - on some other site. However, with open standards I'm not hiding any pieces of the technology, so someone else can look at my blog, and decide to pull the entries automatically.

Lord no! It's copyrighted! It's mine mine mine!

Well, no. I really don't care - I mean, honestly, I'm not making a red cent publishing this here, and what I find I'm intentionally trying to share. So the more I can share it, the better, see? And if I don't have to do anything to share it, even more better better, yezno?

So that's the ... really basic gist behind tools that are collectively called Web2.0. Some of these tools are a bit more complex then where most of us are prepared to go.

Another example - if I take a "Web2.0" tool designed on open standards - like Google Maps - and then I took posted information on gas prices at various pumps around the U.S....

And then some magic happens here, where I'm pretty darn smart and I program a little interface to tie the gas prices to actual pump locations....

I'd have the Cheap Gas Google Map guide.

Now that's useful, particularly in these times. I know what you're thinking - "I wouldn't know how to design that interface!" Well, that's a high-end example.

So take those photos on my sidebar. (Actually, you should check the copyright for each photo before taking them). I went to Flickr, and followed the steps on their Flickr Badge pages. I selected a tag "theatre" and it created the necessary html for me. I then pasted it into the "Sidebar" section of my Blogger template.

If I was smarter, I could edit the html myself. (But I'm not - I'm lazy.)

By the way, here is a more specific theatre photoset. Maybe if I get trickier, I can use this one instead of just "theatre." In either case, what's Very Cool is that this set is automatically updates. Since I've played with this badge - adn since I've edited this entry - 3 new photos have bumped their way onto the sidebar, replacing the three I started with. So I get new content all the time, without doing anything!

More on Web2.0 tools to come!

October 2005 is Funding for Arts Month at the Foundation Center

2005-10-06T15:34:00.000-07:00

That about sums it up!

Some of the local (SF) highlights:

October 14 - Arts Education Funding: Current Trends, Future Directions

October 19 - 20 - Focus on the Individual Artist as Grantseeker
Oct 19

Survival Strategies for Struggling Artists w/ Networking Session.
Getting Started with "Foundation Grants to Individuals Online"

Oct 20

Grantseeking Basics for Individuals in the Arts.
Fiscal Sponsorship and the Arts
Meet the Grantmakers: Opportunities for Individual Artists
Fundraising for Film and Media Projects.

October 25 - Creative Fundraising Strategies for Arts Organizations

October 27 - A Day for Arts Organizations

Meet the Grantmakers: Funding Opportunities for Arts Organizations.
Introduction to Corporate Giving for Arts Organizations.
Corporate Sponsorship and the Arts.

But there's a lot more going on, online, and in Atlanta, Cleveland, New York, and Washington DC. So check it out.

More coverage of the techno-DIY phenom in the arts

2005-09-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

So I've talked a couple of times about the trend of artists bucking the middle-person - e.g. "curators" - in favor of producing and distributing art themselves. This trend is gaining currency and coverage, and a good way of interpreting it is presented in Andrew Taylor's arts participation breakdown. I would argue that artists have (tried to) conform to a "curatorial" space for a very long time, vying for air-time and credibility as determined by institutions. And that's changing because of technology and economics - there's actual money to be made using technology to circumvent the Big Guys (NYT non-theatre link just to reflect the techno-DIY trend....)

(In reference to the Newsweek article, how ecommerce would work for a performing arts group is still a little unclear to me. Fine artists and musicians typically have "products"; performing arts organizations' "products" hinge on the fact that you are attending a live experience.....)

Note that all the while, I still believe there are benefits to partnering with (or perhaps being lucky and/ or talented enough to be chosen by) an institution that will support your work.

Project management in the performing arts

2005-09-19T16:35:00.000-07:00

As I head into the rehearsal stretch of a show I'm involved in, I cannot help but think that producing a show is a lot like project management in any other realm. I have a ton of lists: to do's, contact names, calendars, etc. I try to keep most of it together on my (Mac) laptop using NoteTaker, but that only gives me access to what's going on, and isn't really designed for that.

Joe over at BiS (caveat about reading archived BiS entries in Mozilla) came across geek darling-product BaseCamp, and immediately got it's usefulness for the production process. As I point out in my comments there, I think BaseCamp's list of suggested uses for theatres face a tough hurdle of replacing the human-connection so key in producing performing arts work. But there is a golden nugget here for performing arts organization - not necessarily only with BaseCamp, but with any "distributed project management" applications. Read Marnie's thoughts, and then think about the project managment needs of small-to-no budget groups that perhaps don't have an office. (Not necessarily endorsing BaseCamp per se - see some of the feedback to Marnie's post).

Others are far ahead of us on this thinking - Circle X, 10-year-old, Los Angeles-based theatre group I met at the NETFest, was actually using Intranets.com as their communications and work development portal.

(And if my saying "project management needs" in the context of producing a performing arts show sounds a little too corporate, replace that with "production needs"'....)

Post- Katrina resources, including arts support

2005-09-19T15:55:00.001-07:00

TechSoup.org Katrina is a resource page for nonprofits impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The two main resource docs will be revised in the future, but we wanted to get the information out as soon as possible.

Also, I mentioned the Craft Emergency Relief Fund in a previous post, and I wanted to remind people of its existence - since the after-effects of Katrina is exactly what they seem to deal with (although they might be a little overwhelmed right now...).

Post- Katrina resources, including arts support

2005-09-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

Theatre Podcasts - Cool as Hell

2005-09-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dramaturgs are a smarter, different breed of people who have been sent here to help us out.

That precious bit of wisdom (which I happen to agree with) comes from Sean Daniels (see previous links). No, not from his blog, but from an online interview with Michael Rice, a performer and techie who has been posting theatre podcast interviews for the last two months. It's an impressive endeavour, given he's already made 20 podcasts, and he's interviewed several performers from the current SF Fringe Festival, Liebe Wietzel, and Naomi Wallace!

I'd have to agree, this is Cool as Hell.

(The "recent podcasts" on his front page is not up to date - click on "Listen to the Podcasts" to get the most recent.)

Sean Daniels on blogging at CalShakes

2005-09-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

A while back I mentioned that CalShakes was doing backstage blogs (blagstages?). I sent Sean Daniels, the Associate Artistic Director, some questions about his efforts, and he got back to me once he was able to surface for air after putting up the second part of the Nicholas Nickelby epic.

What prompted you to start a blog for Othello?

I wanted to find a way that we could open up lines of communication between our artists and our audience. In the sports world they fine players if they don't do interviews after the game, in theater we purposely hide everyone after the show. Oddly enough the sports world seems to be doing a bit better than the arts world these days, and I think one of those reasons is that people feel like they have personal connections with the athletes they watch. They don't often feel the same way about the artists they watch. I wanted to find a way in which our audience members could get closer to the artists they love and also find out just what it takes to put on a production.

Where did you promote your blogs?

We mainly put it on our website and included it in our e-materials.

So what happened?

I don't know if it was just because of the blogs, but last season combined we sold about 200 "Under 30" tickets, and for Othello we sold a bit over 900. Now, clearly that's not just because of the blogs, but I think it's because of the many things we're doing to make connecting with us easier. As you've probably noticed, our website (www.calshakes.org) is also a world easier to navigate and now we do same-day-on-line tickets...this is all part of what led to people under 30 attending our show. Or just making it easier for people of all ages to attend our shows.

And since then you've asking actors to blog during Nicholas Nickelby.

The actors seem to have really enjoyed it, in fact, they've given hope to the next round of actors that we asked to blog for THE TEMPEST. Of course, when they are rehearsing and performing it's tough for them to keep up with it, but I think that also shows the time commitment that they are making to the show. If you don't have to time to blog, you must barely have time to nap.

Any feedback on this latest round of blogs?

People want honesty, and I think as people get more comfortable doing this, they'll feel more comfortable being honest about what's working and what's not. If a blog ends up being someone writing a valentine to themselves, that's no good. I think we did a great job of telling the story of rehearsal for these two shows.

Will you be doing it again?

Oh yes, on top of everything else I already said, I think it's a great way to crack open the artistic process and let people see what we do. In theater, we're always SOOOO secretive about everything that it often comes across as being exclusionary and that's about the opposite of what theatre should be. I hope that people discover that they rehearsal process is as much a journey (if not more) than the show itself. That and everyone loves a good war story from rehearsal.

KatrinaList redux - what we do right

2005-09-13T15:46:00.000-07:00

[Again, off-topic but current....]

I am blown away by the techie response to Katrina - predominantly in the form of KatrinaList. And this is a distributed, non-top-down model of cooperative development.

(Politically, it could be asked why didn't US techies respond this way to the tsunami - which I don't have a pat answer for, though this kind of response seems to me a more obvious step in tech-saturated, consistent-language/ spelling U.S.)

A great (informal) timeline of what has happened here (somewhat techie) - check out the rest of his blog if you are intersted in issues in Africa.

Katrinalist - doing it right

2005-09-12T13:47:00.000-07:00

Not performing arts related, but I'm giving myself permission to digress here (since I was away for a lot of the crisis):

This is a great blog chronicalling the creation and development of a computer technology center at the Houston Astrodome, and some of the great things that can happen when technology can work for the right reasons.

Connecting to family and loved ones after a disaster is challenging and emotionally trying, and it is nice to see - amidst the litany of systemic failures weve seen - things working right, namely, communities of people using their technology interst and skills to create opportunities for people to re-unite.

Unfortunately, as my friend and colleague in the Red Cross volunteer station at Baton Rouge pointed out, there are a lot of different people out there trying to help, and sometimes that makes the work harder..... So the people behind CivicSpace, SalesForce, Social Source Foundation and Craigslist put together a "single-source" location to search for hurricane survivors, that pulls together over 25 different online resources on the Web - KatrinaList.

If you are looking for someone, you should first check the list of people evacuated before the hurricane struck (KatrinaSafe) - then go to Katrinalist.

Vacation OFF, Work ON (hmmm, brain still OFF)

2005-09-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

So I returned to work last week with no emergencies in my mailbox (although my very first meeting made up for that). What was in my mailbox, though, was a number of great emails about, or related to, this blog - which I'll try to keep up with in the next couple of days.

First of all - it's happening RIGHT NOW - is the nonprofit blog exchange. In case you didn't know, talking about - and linking to - other people's blogs is a key way of publicising yourself and you blog. Lots of bloggers track who links to them and talks about them - and if you have the obvious good taste to like their blog, then they'll come check out what else you have to say, and they'll talk about you, and all of a sudden both of you have expanded your audiences.

Well, I admittedly do a poor job of that, because I tend to link mainly to websites, not blogs, and folks tend not to scan who links to their websites as judiciously as who links to their blogs.

(So one thing I promise, as I dig through my email heap, is more links to good blogs.)

Vacation ON, Comments OFF

2005-08-09T15:58:00.000-07:00

I'm off to France for a month, so I doubt you'll be seeing anything in this space for a while.

In the meantime, since I've already started receiving comment spam, I'm turning off comments until I return and keep an eye on them....

Tooty-lure and Ah-byan-tow
Gregoire

Short mailing list primer

2005-08-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

I just did a quick investigative trip into the world of (inexpensive) mailing lists for a performing arts client - let's call them the Generic Players (the GPs). The basic parameters were:

They have their own domain (e.g. genericplayers.org - don't look for it, doesn't exist, this is an example, remember?).
They want to be able to send out email from their domain - i.e. anouncements@genericplayers.org
The mailing list is announcements only - not a discussion list.
They have about 2500 subscribers - they want to send out about an email a month.

We started by looking at their web host - which is where I would always recommend starting. Their host is Website Source (the actual host), and the GPs, as we'll call them, have paid for the cheapest plan, natch - the All-in-One.

Well, first I just looked at the services available at that price level - not too shabby. I saw their "Marketing Package" and decided this might be the first place to investigate. However, based on their price level (read: "free"), the marketing tool only allows 500 emails a month - a far cry from the 2500 the GP's want to send. Needless to say, the GP's don't want to pay more than they have to.

The next part was tricky - because I figured the organization could download any number of free/ open source mailing list applications, and dump it on their hosted web server. Lo - their price level does not officially give them access to server space - just a pre-set control panel.

Hmmm - too little was offered with the free version of the marketing tool, and they couldn't download and install their own tool. Only in a last review of the hosting services did I find that Website Source offered another mailing list tool - not nearly as fancy as the Marketing Package, but a very simple, do-it-yourself mailing list application called ezMLM. Not my first choice - but beggars can't be choosers.

Currently, as far as we can tell, the only restriction on the size of the mailing list is their monthly bandwidth allotment. For example, their current allottment is 40GB of "data transfer" per month. If they send out 2500 copies of a 7k HTML email, that's 17.5MB - easily within their allotment (don't forget that website visits also count towards that data transfer bandwidth allotment).

Of course, your mileage may vary, given your website host. In conclusion, my little primer on how to investigate the possibility of setting up a mailing list tool on your site:

Start with your web host. Most hosts have some sort of tool you can use. The question is, how much does it cost? (Sometimes, it's included in your monthly cost.)
If your host does not have an adequte solution, find out if you can install your own tool. Some web hosts explicitly do not allow you to host an email list (for example, see Laughing Squid). Also, most of the tools mentioned below require LAMP - what this means to you is simply that your web host should be running a suite of services that these email applications require to operate - typically Unix-based server like Apache, and something called PHP, both very common. (Specifically, not a Windows web server....) Your web host folks can confirm whether the tools listed below will work on their servers.
Also find out if your website host has any bandwidth or email restrictions before you start sending out a series of emails. It's often good to warn the tech folks at your website hosting service first, because if they see a coupla thousand emails going out on your domain, they might shut it down, assuming a spammer got control of your login....
Install one of the free tools out on your domain. I don't have nearly enough time to give you a primer on how to do that, but here's a good starting list of free tools.

ezMLM
PHPList
Mailman
Majordomo

Do the math to make sure your your emails won't go over your monthly data transfer allotment. And please don't confuse data transfer with data storage.....
If worse comes to worse, and you need a low-cost alternative, you may have to host your list externally (i.e. not on your domain). While Online Policy Groups can host lists for free, I don't know if that includes lists on your domain (e.g. announce@yourdomain.org as opposed to your-announce@onlinepolicy.org). Otherwise, you may be stuck with Google Groups, Yahoo Groups or Topica.

Craft Emergency Relief Fund

2005-08-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

In a similar vein to the health insurance resources for artists, what about emergency funds (something like the Theatre Bay Area's Lemonade Fund)?

Perfect timing for the folks over at CERF - who just launched their new web site (which, as the title indicates, is craft focused). Congratulations go to Vermont tech-for-nonprofit evangelist Sonny Cloward.

And I like it even more because it's based on an open source web implementation tool called Drupal. You'll be hearing more about Drupal in this space (and I'm sure, elsewhere) in the months to come....

Health insurance for artists

2005-07-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

Speaking of butts - how about keeping them safe and healthy? Again, Joe at BiS has a great round-up of health resources for artists (including health insurance). The local theatre service org, Theatre Bay Area, tried for a long time to negotiate a decent health insurance rate for members, but eventually just teamed up with Fractured Atlas (mentioned in Joe's piece) who already had a decent plan.

[Minor Caveat: For what it's worth, the links to Joe's blog don't seem to render properly in Firefox. If you read this in the next week or so, the article may still be on the front page which works with Firefox. Otherwise, use I.E. or a blog aggregator?]

Touring resources

2005-07-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a great community-building idea- have different touring performing artists from around the U.S. (and Canada?) give advice on touring, as well as resources and performance spaces in their own backyard.

As Joe points out on his "Butts in Seats" blog, the idea for the GoTour site is great - but the input isn't there yet. It's on my list to add some detail about SF, but since I've never toured, I can only comment about what's available here....

And if you want the non-grass-roots versions of touring resrouces, you can check out APAP and NPN.... (Membership typically required).

France meets citizen journalism

2005-07-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

I didn't find this via GVO, but from the Del.icio.us list generated in the URL "hack" descrbed in the previous post.

The great thing about foreign language sites is the bosses can't really tell if the content is work-related.....

Or maybe they can?

(P.S. Despite my Del.icio.us list's content, no, I'm not preparing to move to France any time soon.....)

(Obligatory Tech for Arts Orgs relevance: uh... Website as community building? Hmm... uh, look, they have theatre reviews!....)

Good, or rather, "Delicious" resources (and a gratuitous France connection)

2005-07-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering what those links are to the right, I started using del.icio.us for work a few months ago. At its most basic, it's a way of organizing bookmarks using an online service (handy if you use computers at home as well as at work); and also allows you to add your own "categories." I say this now because in my previous discussion about it, I kinda glossed over this simplest application of it.

I'm using it frequently for work - and for home, so now I know I'm a convert.... For example, I'm going to France for a month, and I occasionally find websites at work that I want to access from home (... uh, I didn't just say that on a work blog, did I?.... Well, see ObFrance reference below). So now I just post those links to Del.icio.us, add the word "France" in the tags, and when I go home and check my Del.icio.us account - Voila, as they say.

(Or "wala" as Sean Daniels sez... ;-) )

You can stretch the Del.icio.us list above and find all links tagged "France" using the URL "hack."

Anyway, nptechxpert Brian Del Vecchio has compiled a list of Del.icio.us resources; unfortunately, although it starts with a list of "primers" for non-techies, it's listed in a format that may be confusing to non-techies (well, let's just say I was confused, but that may not be saying much...).

So I'll help cut to the chase by leaping the link to a great (and straightforward, non-techie) overall description of how Del.icio.us works (and "John" even translated the page into Spanish...)

OK - an obligatory France Work Link then: As part of this year's "Bresil en France" celebrations, the "Libre Software Meeting" (last month) hosted Sergio Amadeu of the National Institute of Information Technologies, the man responsible for pushing the Brazilian governement towards Open Source software (he equated Microsoft to drug-dealers, saying they distributed low-cost hardware, then jacked up the cost of maintaining the systems with expensive software licensing - French description here).

Hmm - Brazil and France. That's a goooood combo in my book.

Another one overdue - Cal Shakes blogs

2005-07-18T15:40:00.000-07:00

So I had to find out about this one the hard way - by reading about it... on paper! (That "Victorian affectation," as NTK used to call it.) This month's Theatre Bay Area magazine has a brief mention of Cal Shakes' new associate artistic director's blog, for their (past) show Othello.

Evidently, something worked because now Sean Daniels (AAD in question) asked three actors (Domenique Lozano, Jim Carpenter, and Joan Mankin) to blog their experience for the new adaption of the Dicken's epic, Nicholas Nickelby.

Judging from the entries, I'm guessing the actor-bloggers got swallowed by the production sometime in the last few days of rehearsal - something probably unavoidable for people involved in a big show like that. But up until then, it's fascintating to read the ins and outs of rehearsals - as well as the ins and outs of performers' minds.

(And something else that seems unavoidable - not knowing who is going to give you feedback...)

Way overdue - the Walker Art Center

2005-07-08T17:08:00.000-07:00

Beth covered the Walker Art Center over a month ago, and I read her two-part series at the time - but never followed up on it. So now I have to rectify that, because not only are they a good example of using blogs to do what Beth calls "demystifying the artistic process", but also because they have a great website that uses technology very smartly. Not to mention they have great art. ;-)

CC licenses - different for developing countries

2005-07-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

I like the idea behind Creative Commons in general - picking and choosing which rights you allocate to any particular creation of yours (as opposed to the good-ole "all rights" or "no rights"). While this idea has been gathering momentum in Europe (and even Brazil), it's a hard sell in Africa, for good reason:

But many developing countries – especially those in Africa – have yet to fully embrace the open content concept. This is because of a number of factors – most importantly Africans’ general distrust of ‘giving away’ information when indigenous knowledge is being regularly ‘stolen’ by people outside of the community.

And now here's another reason I like Creative Commons - I can differentiate my licenses between "developing" and "developed" nations (as defined by the World Bank).

The Developing Nations license allows you to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of your work in developing nations while retaining your full copyright in the developed world.

Arts funding source online - again

2005-07-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

(Ahh! Joe beat me to the NYFA Source link by a week! Obviously I haven't been keeping up my reading nor my writing....)

So while I was at the Ensemble Theatre Fest, I not only met Bob Leonard, one of the key people behind the Community Arts Network (that I originally discovered via Butts in Seats) that is a great online resource for community-based arts work. There's a bit too much to describe here - I suggest you just check it out.

... But I also attended a funders' roundtable. When a funder points you to a searchable website listing national arts-funding sources, it's time to perk up and listen.

Conferences and Festivals

2005-06-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

I'm about to jet off to the NET Fest (for my personal, nefarious purposes) - but if there's any interesting technology happening there, you'll be the first to know, fer sure.

In the meantime, the technology innovation discussion continues at the SuperNova conference - starting with, it sounds like, the age-old questions "Is this really innovation?" - and for whom, exactly?:

Honestly, the most interesting thing on display is the gender dynamic of the conversation. I can't tell whether this is a relevant detail or not, but I'll include it nonetheless: The room is very predominantly male. Janice, you might have noticed from some pronoun clues, is female. Has that set the tone of the discussion at all? Would Chris Anderson have drawn more snark from the audience had he been Christine, instead of, ostensibly, Christopher?
I think I might have noticed one other black man at the conference so far, so maybe that's the only reason I'm sensitive to this.

Arts Blogging in my own backyard

2005-06-17T14:30:00.001-07:00

Laughing Squid's implementation of WordPress (which they are offering to all of their hosted sites) is a great example of how something as simple as a blog can be pretty versatile without trying too hard.

One nice this about this blog is the ability to tag individual items (something I don't do in Blogger because there's no native support for it.) But if you look at the bottom of any given post, you'll see what words they've used to tag their content. Go on, click on one of the tags....

You'll be brought to another live page, consisting only of content marked with that tag. And better yet, it has a permanent URL. For example, I randomly picked the "books" tag. (There's not much there as of July 17th, but it's a newish blog....) I don't have to change my link above to the books tag, yet I will always see new stuff that gets posted; and best for the Squid Team, they don't have to do a lot of fancy HTML'ing and re-organizing of their web-content folders for all that to happen....

And a side-trip inspired by this blog: There's a post about the Royal De Luxe parade in Nantes. All Scott had to do was go to Flikr, type in "royaldeluxe", and all of a sudden he can see a ton of other photos from that same parade.

Depending on the rights available for each photo (which are listed on any given photo page on Flikr), you can dig up your own relevant photo content- whether it's about gay pride, a particular type of art, fire-dancing, or even protests - you just have to figure out what "tag" is going to give you the best results....

Threatening artists only encourages them

2005-06-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

[A random Friday-afternoon round-up of artsy things that - if nothing else - I found on the Internet....]

So I mentioned earlier a (perceived) trend towards anti-authoritarianism. Although I wanted to point to Banksy, I couldn't remember his name - so let's rectify that and file it under the DIY clause. (And in the tech-related realm - I wouldn't know about this if it weren't for massive cross-linking to The W. Collective's "content-rich" website - not to be confused with the W. Group.).

This could also arguably be applied to the P2P file-sharing movement - we currently have much better file-sharing technology, for a wider range of media types, because Napster was shut down. And I'm not talking about illegitimate uses either....

Then I read about a cease-and-desist notice from major play-publisher Samuel French - for a production they already OK'd - that resulted in a new satire of the whole thing being created by the theatre company. [Original discussion here. Follow the dotted links to see variations on the theme.]

At first I was very proud - try to control the artists and they just get more creative.

Then I read about the Secret Service getting involved in intimidating arts shows and people posting collages to online galleries. So far, even subsequent efforts to post similar types of collage photos have been removed....

"Free speech." Free as in beer, but not as in speech?

I'd like to think that the artists will eventually win out over intimidation.

If not, I might have to warn my boss about a possible trip by the .... SS? Better get out my rolodex of EFF friends.

Dance website puts it together

2005-06-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

OK, so I complain when my online searching of the performing arts is limited to theatre - then proceed to do a search based on the keyword "theatre" (see my previous post).

In rectifying that, I came across an interesting UK-based dance website called Critical Dance that has an intersting combination of online functionalities I've been discussin here:

An ongoing "magazine" (with submissions from "non-experts")
An extensive image gallery
An extensive forum where a) the most recent "talk" is excerpted on the front page, b) almost every topic is current...
Threads of their reviews reposted to their forums to continue the discussion. A good example is here (although it's a little difficult to follow the timeline).

Audience reviews as a new norm?

2005-06-14T15:43:00.000-07:00

No, probably not yet. But.... I was at a theatre fundraiser last night, and one of the most lucrative fundraising activities was purchasing tickets for the opportunity to dunk a host of local theatre critics. While it was all in good fun, the fervour of some of the "dunkers" got a little personal. Probably not really improving the long-standing tradition of wariness between critics and theatre-makers.

This got my mind wandering to audience reviews - not that I think one needs to replace the other, or that either are really going to provide the ultimate judgement of a piece of work. (I mean, it can be cathartic to dunk a critic - but you don't want to go around dunking every person who didn't like your show, do you?... Do you?).

So I did a little searching - really, not much. Audience reviews generally seem to be available when a particular theatre thinks it's a good idea - although a San Francsico site and an unrelated one in Kansas City have attempted to be both universal and democratic by offering the ability to write reviews of any show that's playing locally.

(And do I need to remind you that many Fringe Festivals make it a point to allow audience reviews?)

Sound, text - where are the pictures?

2005-06-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

In the performing arts world, I personally primarily deal with theatre (if that wasn't obvious already). This can certainly have a blinder affect on where my web searching takes me.

For example, I found (via a long-lost trail I cannot remember now - I know, the first rule of blogging is credit your sources...) an innovative (?) site that features round-table discussions-cum-theatre reviews in audio format: theatreVOICE. Quite compelling - although they don't (yet) offer podcasts.

Then there's theatre texts made available online - the idea being that it's not the text you should ultimately pay for, but the right to produce it. Playscripts offers free extended extracts; ProPlays allows you to "tip the playwright" if you like the play (and of course, then pay the playwright if you want to produce the play).

(Also among the first few pages that come up on the Google search: a compilation of historical plays from England and Ireland - which have now ended up in my open-content tag list- just be aware of how far back copyright extends in England....).

Then there's Doollee, the website that aims to:

... list every play written or produced in English since 1956 [...]. As a general rule of thumb, if you are, or know of a playwright who has had at least one play written or produced in English since 1956 then you are eligable for inclusion on the site.

Every play? Produced in English (but not necessarily in England) - of course, they don't publish the full text, but still - that's a lot of plays. Ad free, sponsored by referred book purchases. And it even lists the playwright's agent, if you're working that far up the chain....

But what about images? And video? And this is where my theatre-centricity constrains me - because I'd love to see / find sites that use technology to share / publish images and video. I imagine this is already happening in the dance world - but there's the challenge that like the texts of plays, the video of a dance performance essentially "gives it away" - so how does the director / choreographer get any reward?

Taking I.T. into your own hands

2005-06-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

[This post was originally inspired by some seemingly unrelated articles on ArtsJournal and elsewhere- and I've let them sit and fester for a while before I tried to tie it all together.]

There's a growing resistance to traditional arts forms and institutions, where (because?) other people determine the value of a particular art, publication, performance, etc.

We saw it in the recording industry, where not only music "consumers" but even musicians themselves wanted to more direct access to each other, and wanted to avoid the gatekeepers (who are portrayed more business-minded than quality-minded).

We can see recursive layers of resistance to "authoritarian"-seeming structures in the ongoing evolution of Burning Man - the event and the organization.

Couple this trend with news that traditional venues for developing, producing and promoting arts get cut, and what do you do?

Well, you DIY. Despite what people may think of you.

This is not new. This happens in cycles, throughout history. Sometimes it's called a revolution, sometimes it's called a cultural shift.

And when you have computers, we see a new fold in this time-honored trend -

You techno-DIY.

We saw it happen with the advent of VCRs and CD players.

We see something happening with museums, where their pay-for-"our"-interpretation programs are being usurped by Podcasting.

(My preferred term is the full "techno-DIY" - only 28 Google matches as of 6/9/06, including some interesting ones.... And of course, the "interference" with posts about techno music....)

Something tells me this also ties in with the concept of a mediated culture, but my threads above are tenous as it is...

How online ticketing changed my life

2005-06-06T10:17:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, how it changed my job.

OK, my other job. I moonlight at some theatres around town, running the house before a show. That means I'm the guy who looks for your name on the list, takes you money, and gives you a ticket. Yeah - that's me.

It used to be that I would show up 2 hours before a show, and look at the reservation list. We accepted unpaid reservations that we would honor until 10 minutes before showtime. And while we didn't accept credit cards at the door, we allowed purchase by card over the phone - typically with the information left on the phone. So not only was that inherently insecure (phreaking, anyone?), if it was a busy night, me or the person who worked the afternoon office shift before me had to run anywhere from 5 to 15 credit card purchases on our little machine in the office before we opened the house.

Depending on who was performing, we might also sell tickets to a show via TicketWeb - but that wasn't the theatre's standard policy, so it never became standardized. Typically over half of our show required people to pay at the door - either in cash or check, with the invariable scramble when we reminded people that we didn't take credit cards at the door (we just never had the time to run credit cards while people were in line).

I hadn't worked there in a couple of months, so when I returned to run the door last week, I was pleasantly surprised to see they had switched their entire operation to an online ticketing agency.

The system now requires that if you want to make a reservation, you have to pay in advance. While this is a difference in "methodology" for the regular audience, there apparently has not been a significant negative impact. None, actually, if you go by a co-worker's casual observation. You can also still pay at the door - but my job has changed radically. Anyone with a reservation has already paid - I don't have to run credit cards before a show. In addition, over half the show is paid in advance, so the time it takes to process people through the line is much faster.

It used to be that a sold out show (for a 99-seat theatre) would take 35 minutes to get everyone through the line (including the stragglers at the end) - because most of them still had to pay. My coworker was telling me that now when a show sells out, there is literally no one who pays at the door (i.e. it's sold out online); and they can fill the theatre in 15 minutes, because no time is lost messing with change, checks and "You don't take credit cards?"

Now remember two things:

The main affect is improved efficiency in my work. I.e. the shows were selling out before they switched the system - now became easier to handle. The ticketing system did not miraculously increase their overall ticket sales.
This improved efficiency is not unique to the specific vendor they used. What has helped the process is the ability to sell tickets in advance online, and have sales reports handy the evening of the show to help the house managers. This is common to many online ticketing agencies.

Some cool arts-related things

2005-05-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Mostly from Beth's artsblog Del.icio.us link (see comment on previous post).

First, Rhizome.org that focuses on new media. But wow - what a great marriage of community-building and technology. A quick round-up:

Regularly updates news / info pages
Submit and view other people's art
Submit and view events
Submit and view opportunities
Community listings

And another page that is not a community-building site, but has one key feature that I love. I first looked at this Italian blog and thought - I wish I could read it. And lo - click on the "read more" link....

Now if only more sites would do that (and I don't just mean into English) we might start something *really* happening here. (Do I sense yet another category list of bilingual sites/ blogs?......)

A modest proposal, an interesting challenge, a great opportunity

2005-05-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

One issue has come up regularly for me and other colleagues who work with performing arts organizations: how can technology help their development department - in particular, community / audience building, which feeds directly into development....

Conventional thinking is that every audience member is a potential volunteer / donor, and the more they are invested emotionally into the org, the more they will invest financially - either by seeing more shows, or through donations.

We're trying to get away from the idea that the only time someone "invests" in their favorite nonprofit is the once-a-year donation letter approach. This idea has led to a lot of client database development projects, which cost a lot of money up-front, and require significant ongoing costs.

It seems this idea of "investing" the audience / community into the process - which is happening with performing arts orgs already with open rehearsals, special benefit events, etc - can happen with online tools too.

That is clearly the thinking behind Doug Varone's blog for his Deconstructing English project.

Soooooo - you see where this is going.....

So some brainstorm ideas:
Use a blog purely as an internal tool
To capture rehearsal ideas that are otherwise difficult to capture - which can be particularly relevant for performing arts orgs. For example, this is my (other) blog, for members of my performance group. Since we're in between projects, I'm just capturing ideas - but you can see some actual "charts" and recorded congas in January and earlier.

Use a blog as a community building tool
- Post regular updates of what's happening in rehearsal, design and production of the piece (without giving away the surprises, etc).
- Remind people about upcoming special events (benefit appearances; special talk-back events; reviews of the show, etc)
- Regular intervals of "bios" of the performers and background on the production (original author of a play, for example)
- Use a free picture-hosting site like Flikr.com to post rehearsal pictures
- Use a free audio-posting tool like Audioblogger to post original music, or snippets of dialogue
- Don't worry about giving the show away (within reason). People who see snippets of beautiful sets, rehearsals, or hear parts of songs are going to be *more* interested in seeing the full show, rather than feel like they've "already seen it all".... (in my opinion)

Use a blog for audience feedback / reviews!
- Possibly start with some friends who agree to seed the discussion for you
- Get some (friendly) scholars on board to comment
- Ask some of your organization's closer community (long time volunteers, significant donors, etc) to review you.....

What are the costs?

Tools:
Free.
Sure, you can pay for more advanced blogging, audio and photo hosting sites, but you can start for free....
Time:
- Setting up an initial blog: 30 minutes
- Customizing it from standard templates, with org logo, etc (for someone with HTML skills): 1 hour of talking/ planning, 30 minutes implementation
(And you don't have to do that right away...)
- Setting up accounts for picture and audio hosting: 15-30 minutes
- Ongoing posting:
- Daily rehearsal progress posts - 5-15 minutes a day (per post)
Can be done by any performers and/ or stage manager and/or director
- Photos: upload to Flikr - 10 min, link to blog post -10 min
Done by authorized picture taker; commentary by staff/ performers
- Special events updates - 10-15 minutes
Done by org staff
- Organizing audience reviews: this would take some more serious time and planning; probably require a separate blog, and relationship mgmt time (scholars, donors, other review contributers)

Final caveats:
There is little overhead, but this is a time investment. And you'll want to spend time marketing the marketing tool - i.e. getting the word out about the blog. And you can't go half-bore with this. It's worse to have an old blog site with a few stagnant posts than have nothing at all.

Finally, there is the argument that people seeing the process, photos, blog, etc could be turned off (as opposed to knowing nothing about the show). Well.... if you believe in your show, you don't want to "trick" people into seeing something they would have avoided otherwise, right?

[Follow this spot, and I will start a Del.icio.us thread for performing arts blogs that are used for development / promotional purposes (as opposed to a personal blog that follows the trials and tribulations of an individual's experience). That means - comment / send me links!]

Not quite a ghost town

2005-05-24T17:20:00.000-07:00

.. but I think I saw a tumbleweed blow through here.

'Kay- I'm back. I'm I might even have an evangelical project in mind I'd like to promote (CivicSpace development for an int'l arts org, anyone?).

In the meantime, check out Plone4Artists. Not quite what I had in mind, but a nice direction.....

Not quite a "redesign"

2005-05-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

... but... I held my nose, viewed source on a friend's Blogger page, yanked some HTML, and now have a handy one-click spot to the right (over there) that aggregates my current research "threads" (or buckets, as noted ....)

I have already discussed the ticketing and open content research. I added my growing number of tags to "arts distrcits" that I've found on the web - just because it's research I've been doing, and I have the links, and so what the heck. If it's too much information, it's your problem, not mine. :-)

Open content(ions)

2005-05-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in a previous post on copyright confusion, the issue (and vocabulary) around copyright and "free" content is complicated and contentious.

Creative Commons has, IMHO, done the best job so far of explaining what different forms of rights people can reserve of their work. What I'm going to do is let you sort out yourself the words and meanings - but I'd like to start a Del.icio.us list of ... uh, open content? Share-alike content? Public domain (or fair use?) content....

I will focus on non-music "open content" (the word I guess I'm settling on) because the music sampling world is already well up and running.

My open content links:
http://del.icio.us/smokinggoat/open_content

And just to show, as an example, how Del.icio.us can be used to expand on the idea - there's already a bunch of "open content" tagged links:
http://del.icio.us/tag/open_content

Of course, the problem with Del.icio.us is that no one has to agree on what tag exactly to use:
http://del.icio.us/tag/opencontent

In the meantime, I will share a couple of paragraphs I wrote when I originally started thinking about this:

I see the struggle being the attempt to balance capitalism and expression. Intellectual property is protected primarily to make money (officially, to "provide a financial incentive to the creators") - and rightly so. The challenge is to figure out how much money-making protection we should afford "property" versus the potential greater public good of making these properties "public domain."

Wow, it sounds like I'm talking about generic pharmaceuticals - but no, it's also happening in the arts world. Public domain means *anyone* gets the power to use the material: use it for free; alter it; resell it. And that takes away the power of the "property" owner.

Someone else had a much more concise way of putting it (with personal examples in the full post):

[...] the goal of privatization and ownership in perpetuity that pervades the corporate psyche. This process burns a wide swath into the modern landscape: land ownership (property), resource ownership (privatization of water, etc.), and intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc.).

Did I say the ticketing discussion was over?

2005-04-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe for now. But of course, people keep sending me links to yet more ticketing solutions. In an effort to keep up to date, and use the cool tools of the day, I'm am plugging it all into Del.icio.us.

So if you're looking for all my ticketing discussions, as well as additional ticketing service links (all posted by me), go here:

http://del.icio.us/smokinggoat/ticketing

If you want to try the vast world of the tag "ticketing", you can try this:

http://del.icio.us/tag/ticketing

And if you want to see if the tags "arts_orgs" and "ticketing" ever produce anything beyond my posts, watch this link:

http://del.icio.us/tag/ticketing+arts_orgs

And of course you could do the same above with the tag "nptech"....

See how that works?

Public domain vs. public perception

2005-04-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

A journalist in Boston wrote about an outfit that cuts out the "offensive" parts of DVDs and resells them (link found via ArtsJournal). There are some very thorny legal issues involved here - but I'm not here to talk about modifying the content of things which are obviously covered under current copyright law (and very clearly so - all the filmmakers involved have made films within the last 25 years).

What blew my mind was that the author of the Boston Globe article goes on to make - to me - a completely wacky expansion of the "threat" to intellectual property:

If sanitizers can alter a creative work without the permission of the author, will they be able to redo the Bible? Shakespeare? What, in short, does intellectual property mean anymore?

Are you serious? (I really can't tell.... This quote above may be very out of context...) Has everyone forgotten about Project Gutenberg? Have we been so blinded by the pervasive philosophy that everything is owned (from the ridiculous to the scary) that we have forgotten what "public domain" means? (the link even refers to Shakespeare....)

The good news is that just as software developers are pushing back with open source software, so are artists - and not just DJs, but playwrights like Chuck Mee and even broadcasters like the Beeb.

To be continued.....

Last ticketing thoughts - for now

2005-04-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

During my conversation with Steve at Brown Paper Tickets, a number of issues came up about selling tickets that were not specifically related to any platform, so I wanted to put those comments in a separate "box." I'm including them here in kind of a general "online ticketing roundup" - I think this is where I will end this first round of research into ticketing options, standards, and options.

First, let me say that I've heard some unsolicited good feedback about Vendini, previously discussed here. I still have a bit of an issue with their pop-up window to a 3rd-party website (see below), but as also discussed below, they are one of the few that offers customization / look-and-feel services as part of the package. I know that probably doesn't make sense, so just follow the discussion.

On to some good pointers:

Do you really need point-of-sale locations (i.e. non-venue physical source for ticket purchases?)? Most people these days are comfortable picking up a phone to order tickets. So while online ticket purchasing is not quite ubiquitous, that coupled with phone sales will have you covered adequately. The only recommendation Steve made on this point was:

- Youth-oriented events: Youth don't have credit cards. They need a place they can go buy tickets - and preferably in advance....
- Logical tie-ins: Places that do well with point-of-sale locations tend to be the "musical act" (read: rock, pop, hip-hop) tickets being sold at a record store. Let' see, I wanna buy a ticket to the Lhasa concert - and I wanna buy her new CD too.... Doesn't seem as natural with performing arts, unless you're talking about musical theatre maybe?

If you have price levels, or even sliding scale, please describe it: When I run the box office at a local theatre, people will ask the difference between the $15 and $20 seats (to which I respond "Your state of grace"- it's pay -what-you-can). It is important for people to know whether it's open seating or "better seats for the higher price" - and they need to know this when purchasing the tickets, not in the "About Our Venue" link off of the main site....

If you have a sliding scale, go for broke. Sure, it's a pain to enter a new ticket price for $12, $13, $14, $15, etc. But if it really is sliding scale, slide that scale. $12 - $15 - $20 - $50 - $75. Again, it is paramount here for people to know what it is they are purchasing - good karma, or seats farther away from the riff-raff?

Finally, an etiquette comment from Steve that I appreciated: If your event is over $50, include the service fee. It's ridiculous to spend $250 on a ticket (Black Rock City anyone?) and then have to fork over the $2.50 service charge. I'm sure others will disagree on this ("why misrepresent our expenses to the patrons?" vs. "why not make the total ticket price $210 an pocket the extra?"), but I thought it a good comment worth repeating.

The security issue: Some online ecommerce systems - including some ticket systems - will customize their own ticket purchase page to match the "look and feel" of the originating website. I.e.. You want to buy a ticket for a show at The Uptown Performing Arts Center (TUPAC for short)- you click on the "Purchase Tix" button, and you are taken to a new page with not only the logo in the corner, but the same colors, fonts, etc. You "feel" like you're still on the TUPAC website, but if you look at the URL, you've been punted to www.yourtixvendor.com/TUPAC - a 3rd party website (you and TUPAC being the first two parties).

While this was industry standard for a while, redirecting to a new URL/ website is now security and privacy breach standard. It's also the one main concern I have with Vendini, because when you use them, users are linked to a 3rd party website - you just don't' see it because the new window that pops up does not have a URL bar.

However, what Vendini has done right, which puts it in front of the other contenders for theatres with an identifiable image and legitimate website, is offer a ticketing solution that looks elegant and seamless (yes, as it punts you to the Vendini site) - all for about the same price as other ticketing solutions. And that is a coup - because it maintains the aura of professionalism that theatres in that middle ground of (web, not art) legitimacy want to project.

I think I'm going to be pursuing some discussions of fair use and creative commons licenses in the near future as I move on from this topic for now.

NTC follow-up (sorta)

2005-04-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

I mentioned this session, which took place at last month's NTEN conference, previously. Well, just to remind you (as Marnie reminded me), they now have PowerPoint notes online for your perusal. I haven't taken a look at the notes yet, but I did follow the NTC session designer's link to the City of Chicago's Cultural Affairs web page (which wins for best content with the worst URL).

One thing I did see on the Chicago site was a simple idea I would like to see replicated elsewhere - a map of public art locations.

Brown Paper Tickets

2005-03-31T13:02:00.000-08:00

I talked to Steve Butcher of Brown Paper Tickets last week, and I'm just now getting around to posting some notes about our conversation. First, I want to post a similar review of BPT as I did of others; but we also talked about some philosophical / best-practice issues that I want to pull out in another discussion.... When I can get to it.

BPT does the usual full range of ticket services:

Online, secure credit card purchases: this can tie into your merchant account, but they can also just send you a check.
Real-time inventory
Patron information report for that event (i.e. they do not keep "histories" of patron purchases as a security principle); you can also include simple surveys, which will track individual responses as well as aggregate data at the end of the run
Booking stop times

They also offer some of the not-always-offered services:

Ticket printing and mailing (incl. in standard service charge)
24-hour ticket purchasing over the phone (also incl. in standard charge)
Point-of-sale locations: within-store locations where you can purchase tickets from 2nd-party vendors (often record stores). This piece is still in its infancy, mostly around Seattle
You can actually sell tickets on the BPT system from your website (as opposed to ... well, whatever) if you have a consultant work with the integration guidelines provided by BPT. Steve claims a previous theatre did it in a matter of hours and a couple of phone calls, but I tend to rely on Murphy's Law more than on perfect examples
If you verify your address (they send a postcard, you enter info online to close the loop) they send out checks within 10 days. Without verification, it may take longer, which is why they really push for address verification. For several-week run events, they will begin sending checks before the run is over.
You can order pre-printed "bulk" tickets (for hand delivery or will-call receipts) - i.e. tickets they deliver to you for distribution. This is a separate service than mailing out tickets for specific orders, and costs 10c a ticket.

OK, so there are more details, but let's jump to the chase sooner rather than later. They have a standard pricing fee. Let me modify that just a bit- they have a standard, published, pricing fee:
- 99 cents a ticket

plus

- 2.5% of the ticket price

So if your tickets cost $12, the service fee is $1.29. If your tickets cost $25, the service fee is $1.61. The default is to pass this on to patrons, but you can also absorb the fee or split it with patrons like elsewhere.

Not only is the ticket printing and mailing, as well as phone-based ticket sales "included" in the service fee, so is the design of a seating chart map if you have a fixed venue.

To clarify, patrons won't be able to purchase tickets for specific seats, but for seating "levels" based on price and location. The system will automagically pick "best seats" for you - based not only on what's left, but also on your party size, and will group in a line or in a cluster. And if you don't like it, you can always ask for a different selection.

To be honest, I did not get this level of seat-choosing detail from some of the other vendors, so I add this description here more as grist for the mill in your own research, as opposed to a added-value service that may (or may not) differentiate BPT from other players.

Another nice option they have - again, included in the service charge - is box office software. It's essentially the management console on the BPT site, so you can use it anywhere, on any type of computer that has Internet access. It allows you to not only see the tickets sold through BPT, but manage your seat inventory - even if you sell tickets elsewhere. The theatre owner can create box office users, and track sales per box office user; those sales can happen in the staff office, the box office, or elsewhere (point of sale location? your bedroom?). There is no transaction fee if the theatre sells tickets directly - i.e. purchases made directly through the theatre (e.g. walk-up sales) - because all your doing is entering that info in the system, not processing credit cards over BPT. So not only get a live inventory, but also get appropriate tallies at the end of the night.

Again, this is not specifically different from other services - although some ticket vendors do charge for additional box office management software. There are some details that re fuzzy until you see an actual demo - how much actual inventory management (vs. just inventory reporting) do other services like Acterra and TickeWeb offer - and at what price?

In any case, other niceties BPT offers:

During ticket purchase, people can donate to nonprofits listed on BPT sites (there is a waiting list to be one of those nonprofits)
An affiliate program: any nonprofit that acts as an online referral to BPT get a nominal payback per ticket purchased or event hosted through that referral

Finally, I had one issue with them that apparently did not strike any sort of nerve when I asked about it. Their website proclaims them a "fair-trade ticketing service." For me, fair trade means something very specific, but that's because I like coffee, and I've adopted the (admittedly narrow) definition that is in current use. What Steve pointed out when he talked about their "fair trade" practices was a) they are "not just for profit" (as defined here), b) they believe in fair labor and client practices, and c) they are committed to transparency - not only for their clients and patrons, but even for their competitors.

So I'll let the "fair trade" tag slide - unless I ever hear that their programmers are not making a livable wage, and then we'll have to stage a protest. [insert smirk here]

More to come on ticket pricing levels, URL jumping when selling tickets, and privacy....

Extension 311

Aloha - Movin' On

Spin Project - Presentation and thoughts

I'm blogging from CTN

RSS to Email?

Fixed Flock?

Bonding, not branding

IssueLab - nonprofit research portal

Nonprofit Operations Tips blog!

Carnival of Nonprofit Blogs: Technology!

New Technology in the Arts site and blog!

Technorati hates me - I wanna Rent an Expert

The coming mobile revolution

Passing it along: blog tools review

Ego searches on Technorati - aggregated onto Bloglines

Taking a break - till late next week

The resources are here!

Making those connections - a quick review

Making Media Connections - but no resources yet

Tech Strategies for the Developing World

Online Community Camp and Proprietary Communities

WOW! - Slick theatre preview!

I went to wineCamp and all you got was this blog post

Camp Squared 2 NetSquared

Translation - first (personal) feedback.

Entre toi et moi et l'EntreNet

3 events, 7 days, Web 2.0

Detritus of the Digital Life

Can't go to NetSquared? Then go here

There - I like that better

Community website governance structure?

Finding nonprofit Drupal / CivicSpace developers

Convergence: Drupal Camp

Yanking links

Flocker blogging fixed?

New colors, new topics

Handy page translation code

Drupal for Nonprofits - Resources

Offsite video sharing

Now *this* is using technology in the arts!

Open call for a Drupal/ Civic Space Labs volunteer

Catching up with my blog-reading

Open-source CMS challenges

Things to do while I'm gone

Theatre of Yugen composer's blog

SF Wireless Community Meeting - Thursday Dec 14

Web 2.0: Already under your nose

Open Source Content Management Systems - or "Your New Website"

Media Alliance wants your opinion on Wifi in San Francisco

Builder's Association: a process blog

Municipal wireless - why should you care?

Confession: I'm leading a doubl-ogging life.

Quickie: Current TV

Digital Storytelling in New Orleans

Best practices: Dance Weblog, and their How-To

Assorted: Honolulu and Berkeley Arts; Accidental Techie, and free conference calling

That absentee voting thing

Nov 8th: Vote, then be social!

Blogging is hard

More help with Web2.0

Silicon Valley Community Foundation arts initiative

Web2.0 - Whooza-Whatsit?

October 2005 is Funding for Arts Month at the Foundation Center

More coverage of the techno-DIY phenom in the arts

Project management in the performing arts

Post- Katrina resources, including arts support

Post- Katrina resources, including arts support

Theatre Podcasts - Cool as Hell

Sean Daniels on blogging at CalShakes

KatrinaList redux - what we do right

Katrinalist - doing it right

Vacation OFF, Work ON (hmmm, brain still OFF)

Vacation ON, Comments OFF

Short mailing list primer

Craft Emergency Relief Fund

Health insurance for artists

Touring resources

France meets citizen journalism

Good, or rather, "Delicious" resources (and a gratuitous France connection)

Another one overdue - Cal Shakes blogs

Now this is using technology in the arts!